Black Lives Matter might get a big cash injection from liberal mega-donors
Black Lives Matter might get a big cash injection from liberal mega-donors
An elite liberal donor group that has given away more than $500 million is now considering funding the ...
An elite liberal donor group that has given away more than $500 million is now considering funding the Black Lives Matter movement, Politico reports. Activist leaders of groups like the Black Youth Project 100, The Center for Popular Democracy, and the Black Civic Engagement Fund will be featured guests at a Tuesday fundraising dinner of The Democracy Alliance.
Although the civil rights messages of Black Lives Matter fall in line with the values of the Democracy Alliance, some question if the group's confrontational activism, such as shutting down freeways, might alienate the rich donors. DA President Gara LaMarche, for one, admits it might be an issue — but he isn't too worried: "We have a wide range of human beings and different temperaments and approaches in the DA, so it's quite possible that there are people who are a little concerned, as well as people who are curious or are supportive... we'll take stock of that and see where it might lead."
While funding could mean a significant boost toward building a more cohesive architecture for the Black Lives Matter movement, some activists value the group's independence over the allure of big money. And although the Democracy Alliance is left-leaning and separate from the Democratic Party, there's the additional problem of Black Lives Matter activists asking inconvenient questions of presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.
Still, that doesn't deter everyone. "The progressive donor world should be adding zeroes to their contributions that support this transformative movement," Steve Phillips, a Democracy Alliance contributor, said.
Source: The Week
The Actions of the Federal Reserve Bank Have Created an Economy That Hurts Workers And Has Devastated The Black Community
Atlanta Black Star - March 4, 2015, by Nick Chiles - The actions of the Federal Reserve have typically been undertaken...
Atlanta Black Star - March 4, 2015, by Nick Chiles - The actions of the Federal Reserve have typically been undertaken to benefit banks and the financial services sector collectively known as Wall Street, but a new report by the Center for Popular Democracy reveals that the Fed’s traditional policies substantially contribute to the dire economic conditions of African-Americans across the country.
While there have been many reports showing how badly African-Americans suffered from the Great Recession and how middle and low-income Americans have not benefitted from the so-called economic recovery, which was really just a recovery for Wall Street, this report is one of the first to link the fortunes of specific groups like African-Americans to the actions of the Federal Reserve.
The Federal Reserve, the nation’s central bank, remains a shadowy presence to most rank-and-file Americans, who would hardly think of the Federal Reserve when assigning blame for their financial struggles.
The intentions of the Center for Popular Democracy, with assistance from the Economic Policy Institute, are clear just by reading the name of its report—”Wall Street, Main Street, and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard: Why African Americans Must Not Be Left Out of the Federal Reserve’s Full-Employment Mandate.”
In the explanation for the report’s rather trite title, the primary author, Connie M. Razza of the Center for Popular Democracy, said Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard refers to African-American communities because “hundreds of U.S. cities have streets named for Martin Luther King Jr., often located in persistently lower-income Black neighborhoods.”
The report’s premise is that the Fed’s goal of keeping the national employment rate at about 5.2 percent—which the Fed considers “full employment” because it allows for movement in the job market—is actually devastating to the African-American community. The reason: When the national unemployment rate stays in the vicinity of 5.2 percent, the African-American unemployment rate is typically about 11 percent.
But because the Fed is dominated by the interests of Wall Street, the impact of its policies on Main Street or on African-Americans is not ever truly considered.
“Although the Great Recession officially ended nearly six years ago, the American economy is still far from healthy,” the report states. “Wall Street has had a robust recovery. Large corporations are making record profits. But the labor market remains weak.”
As Razza points out, the policy decisions of the Federal Reserve directly affect Main Street and MLK Blvd. The Fed’s primary job is keeping inflation stable, regulating the financial system, and ensuring full employment. But corporate and finance executives generally want to limit wage growth so that they maximize their future profits.
“But most people in America earn their living from wages, not capital income, and it is in their interest to see full employment whereby wages grow faster than prices in order to lift working and middle-class families’ living standards,” Razza writes.
Typically the Feds resolve this dilemma in favor of Wall Street, by intentionally limiting wage growth and keeping unemployment excessively high.
“The Fed’s policy choices over the past 35 years have led to increased inequality, stagnant or falling wages and an American Dream that is inaccessible to tens of millions of families—particularly Black families,” the report says.
As detailed in the report, the last eight years have been catastrophic for the nation’s African-American community in virtually every financial indicator studied by economists:
* In January 2015, the national African-American unemployment rate was 10.3 percent, more than twice the current white unemployment rate and higher than the 10.0 percent U.S. unemployment rate reached in October 2010, at the height of the recession.
* The contraction in public-sector jobs—which are disproportionately held by Black people and women—has meant that the African-American workforce has been disproportionately impacted by the recession. In 2011, the number of African-Americans who were unemployed and had most recently been employed in state or local government was higher than their share in the decline of state and local government job loss, suggesting that they were disproportionately laid off and faced more barriers to finding work after losing their public-sector jobs, according to the report. The loss of public-sector jobs also has potential implications for wage inequality since African-Americans and women who are employed in public service have historically suffered significantly less wage inequality than their peers in the private sector.
* Wages have been stagnant or falling for the vast majority of workers since 2000, the report states. While at the median, wages for white workers have risen only 2.5 percent in 14 years, African-American workers have seen a wage cut of 3.1 percent over the same period. In fact, in two-thirds of the states for which data are available, the median real wages of African-American workers declined between 2000 and 2014. The fastest declines were in Michigan (down 15.8 percent), Ohio (down 13.7 percent) and South Carolina (down 11.6 percent).
* Between 1989 and 2001—a period of comparatively robust job growth and a tight labor market during the late 1990s—the wealth gap between whites and African-Americans narrowed. In 2001, Black households had roughly 16 percent the wealth of white households, compared with 6 percent in 1989. By 2013, median African-American household wealth was only 8 percent that of whites.
The report states that the wealth disparity began growing during the housing boom, precisely because of the racist practices of American banks. Between 2004 and 2007, at the height of the boom, white household wealth increased 23 percent, while African-American household wealth actually declined by 24 percent.
“The convergence of wage stagnation and banks’ preying on African-American communities with risky mortgage products (which banks backed with overvaluations of collateral property), led to African-American borrowers being more likely to receive subprime loans than white borrowers,” the report says. “These loans were frequently made as second mortgages, drawing down equity that homeowners had built up. Discriminatory subprime lending practices drained wealth from African-American homeowners before the recession and certainly made Black wealth significantly more vulnerable during the housing crisis.”
One of the most telling statistics in the report is the detailing of the jobs that the economy has regained during the recovery. If the public needed a clear indication of why so many people are still struggling though Wall Street is back, here it is:
While lower-wage industries accounted for 22 percent of job losses during the recession, they account for 44 percent of employment growth over the past four years. That means lower-wage industries today employ 1.85 million more workers than at the start of the recession.
Mid-wage industries accounted for 37 percent of job losses, but 26 percent of recent employment growth. There are now 958,000 fewer jobs in mid-wage industries than at the start of the recession.
Higher-wage industries accounted for 41 percent of job losses, but 30 percent of recent employment growth. There are now 976,000 fewer jobs in higher-wage industries than at the start of the recession.
And here’s another startling fact showing how much America’s economy has been tilted in favor of corporate America and against workers for a generation. Between 1948 and 1973, the hourly compensation of a typical worker in America grew in tandem with productivity. But since 1973, productivity grew 74.4 percent while the hourly compensation of a typical worker grew just 9.2 percent.
“This divergence between pay and productivity growth has meant that workers are not fully benefiting from productivity improvements,” the report says. “The economy—specifically, employers—can afford much higher pay, but is not providing it.”
So what should the Fed do to help Main Street and MLK Blvd. begin to enjoy the economic “recovery?” The report suggests a change in the structure of the Federal Reserve System so that fewer representatives from the financial industry and corporate America are appointed to the Fed’s governing board and more regular people are added. This would make the Fed more sensitive to the needs of Main Street and MLK Blvd., so that “the voices of consumers and working families can be heard.”
The Center for Popular Democracy suggests that the Fed keep interest rates low “so that the numbers of job openings and job seekers are balanced and everybody who wants to can find a good job.”
In addition, it wants the Feds to provide low- and zero-interest loans so that cities and states can invest in public works projects like renewable energy generation, public transit and affordable housing that will create good new jobs.
The Fed should study the harmful effects of inequality, according to the Center, and examine how policies like raising the minimum wage and guaranteeing a fair work week can strengthen the economy and expand the middle class.
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Is 'Audit the Fed' going mainstream?
Auditing the Federal Reserve, a financial reform long pushed by the libertarian right, just got a boost this week from...
Auditing the Federal Reserve, a financial reform long pushed by the libertarian right, just got a boost this week from an unexpected quarter: A respected Dartmouth economist who issued a new proposal to impose transparency and oversight on the nation’s powerful central bank.
Though largely dismissed by mainstream economists, “Audit the Fed” has become an applause line for central banking skeptics like Sen. Rand Paul, who believe the Federal Reserve wields too much power too secretly. In recent years the idea has spread from right-wing politicians to the conservative mainstream, and even critics on the left: A Senate vote on Paul’s “Audit the Fed” legislation in January garnered 53 votes. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) voted for that bill and has pushed for increased transparency at the Fed to the delight of campaign crowds suspicious that the central bank is rigged in favor of Wall Street.
This week, the Fed Up campaign, a 30-month-old group of labor and community organizations pushing for more openness at the Fed, released its own platform for reforming the Fed’s governance structure, including a new idea for an audit—or "annual review"—that could give the idea more mainstream credibility.
The author is Andrew Levin, an economist now at Dartmouth College who has decades of experience at the Fed and a reputation as a thoughtful observer of the institution. While most financial insiders have long dismissed “Audit the Fed” as an unserious political slogan from people unversed in economics, Levin’s proposal has provoked a more serious reckoning with Fed transparency. And increasingly, economists are coming to the same conclusion: More sunlight might do the central bank some good.
“The Fed is overly sensitive about reviewing its policies,” said Joseph Gagnon, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics who has worked at the Fed off-and-on for the past 30 years.
At issue is whether decisions made by the top officials of the Fed should be open to review by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). Technically speaking, the Fed is already audited – it’s subject to the same GAO scrutiny of its operations as any other federal agency. But its most influential decisions, deliberations on monetary policy that attract global attention and can move stock markets dramatically, are conducted in secret by a dozen top Fed officials. Seven of them, known as Fed governors and based in Washington, are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. The remaining five spots are reserved for the presidents of the 12 regional Fed banks on a rotating basis. Collectively known as the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the group generally meets eight times a year, with minutes released three weeks afterwards. Transcripts of those meetings are released on a five-year lag, effectively sealing its deliberations in the short-term.
Because banks ultimately own the regional Fed banks, and have a say in nominating many of their directors, critics say this structure leaves the door open for favoritism to Wall Street, and needs outside scrutiny to ensure it properly balances its dual mandate of stable inflation and full employment. Supporters say the Fed's relative independence is a virtue, and worry its monetary decisions would be worse in the long run if its officials constantly felt Congress breathing down their necks.
The more traditional right-wing “Audit the Fed” legislation would call for a GAO audit of the Fed within 12 months of passage, and thereafter enable any lawmaker or congressional committee to request an audit of the central bank, including the FOMC’s monetary policy decisions, whenever they wanted.
In his new plan, Levin proposes something slightly different: it would require the GAO to conduct a review of all aspects of the Fed, including monetary policy, but make the review annual and determined by GAO staff rather than Congress. “[Paul’s legislation] just seemed like a way to threaten the Fed,” said Levin.
His proposal would also call for seven-year term limits for Fed officials and reform the process that the regional Fed bank presidents are selected. Though he recoiled against terming the GAO review an “audit,” his proposal would give the GAO new powers to examine different aspects of the Fed, as it does with other agencies in the federal government. Instead of called by Congress, it would be annual and determined by agency staff. “From one year to the next, it might focus on some aspects of the Fed's operations. One year, maybe it would focus on monetary policy strategy and communications,” Levin said. “Another year, maybe it wouldn't spend much time on that.” The results would be publicly available.
Narayana Kocherlakota, the former president of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve, expressed support for the idea of regularly scheduled GAO audits of the Fed’s monetary policy. He didn't take a position on earlier audit proposals, but echoed Levin’s concern that allowing lawmakers to request a GAO audit “would be very bad and would lead us down a bad path where essentially Congress was running monetary policy.”
The Federal Reserve declined to comment on Levin’s plan. But Fed Chair Janet Yellen and other Fed officials have aggressively attacked prior proposals to increase oversight over the FOMC’s deliberations. In January, before the Senate voted on Paul’s legislation, Yellen sent a letter to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Minority Leader Harry Reid opposing the bill. “These reviews could only serve to create public doubt about the conduct and independence of monetary policy,” she wrote.
“All of that criticism does apply to my proposal,” Levin said after reading those lines from Yellen’s letter. But he argued that such oversight is necessary in a democracy. He added, “After all, the Congress is the Fed’s boss.”
Levin enters this debate with considerable experience. He spent two decades as an economist for the Fed and then was a special adviser to then-Chairman Ben Bernanke and then-Vice Chair Yellen from 2010 to 2012. He also advised many other central banks, including the European Central Bank, the Bank of Canada and the Bank of Japan. Those policy bona fides mean he’s being taken seriously even by people who have dismissed previous “Audit the Fed” proposals.
“Levin knows a lot about the internal workings [of the Fed] that I don’t,” said Jared Bernstein, the former top economist to Vice President Joe Biden and a frequent critic of “Audit the Fed” proposals. “He’s not coming at this from the perspective of some radical protester.”
The underlying question is whether an annual review by GAO—not one triggered by individual lawmakers or committees—will cause the Fed to be influenced by politics in its monetary policy decisions. To some extent, that already happens. The Fed, like every institution, faces criticism from an array of politicians, outside economists, and pundits. “Independence is not as black and white as many people make it seem,” said Kocherlakota.
Finding the right balance between giving the Fed room to make independent policy and holding it accountable is a constant challenge—one that extends beyond “Audit the Fed" proposals. Sanders, for instance, has proposed that FOMC transcripts be released within six months, instead of the current five years.
Few serious Fed watchers, however, have spent much time developing detailed ideas for increased Fed transparency. “I felt like there was a vacuum in the discourse,” Levin explained.
Levin’s reforms are unlikely to become law anytime soon: Lobbying efforts around such a change would be fierce, and groups like the Fed Up campaign are likely to be heavily out-spent by Wall Street banks skeptical of changes intended to reduce their influence over Fed decisions. The Federal Reserve would likely oppose the reforms as well.
By DANNY VINIK
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Occupy the Minimum Wage: Will Young People Restore the Strength of Unions?
The Guardian - January 26, 2014, by Rose Hackman - Alicia White, 25, defied the odds of a poor background by attending...
The Guardian - January 26, 2014, by Rose Hackman - Alicia White, 25, defied the odds of a poor background by attending college on a partial scholarship and going to graduate school. While she spends her days applying for jobs, the only work she has found so far is face-painting at children’s birthday parties.
“By going to college and graduate school, I thought I was insulating myself from being broke and sleeping on friends’ couches and being hungry again. The big, scary part is that I am going to end up where I was, but now I am going to be in that awful situation with $50,000 of debt,” White says.
White’s story is no exception. One in two college graduates are now either unemployed or underemployed. Millennials – even those from the middle class – are experiencing income inequality and America’s failed dream of upward mobility first-hand. The mismatch of college-educated young workers with low-wage, unskilled, precarious jobs is creating a new face of the once-dwindling American labor movement: young, diverse, led by millennials in their twenties and thirties, and fighting what they see as an unfair labor market. Their modest cause? Pushing for a higher minimum wage.
Because of too many young people interested looking for work, these millennials reason that the labor movement is the only way to address large-scale poverty and income inequality – starting with their own.
The "Fight for 15" movement is the most visible of these. Designed by the SEIU to raise the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $15 an hour, the effort has been driven by young activists. Last fall, the movement claimed its first legislative victory with residents in SeaTac, Seattle’s airport carrying suburb, voting to raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour.
“There’s more enthusiasm than there has been probably in our lifetime for this,” says Ady Barkan, a 30-year-old Yale Law graduate and staff attorney at the Center for Popular Democracy in New York, indicating that the "Fight for 15" movement is picking up where Occupy Wall Street left off. He calls it “part of a similar cultural moment”.
It doesn't hurt the movement that the difference in pay between unionized and non-union jobs is pronounced. The median weekly earnings of union members in 2012 was $943, compared to $742 for those not in a union, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said in its recently released annual survey of labor.
“The dismal prospects for young workers are underscoring the fact that you can’t rebuild an economy on low-wage jobs and that inequality has reached a point where it really is an existential crisis for America,” says Annette Bernhardt, UC Berkeley's visiting sociology professor, whose work has focused on the low-wage economy and inequality.
Demographically, even the modest interest millennials have shown in the labor movement recently is a reversal of decades of disinterest. Unions have been ageing out of the economy along with their members, with nearly one in six union members aged 55-64, according to the BLS. Amid other trends – offshoring, automation, the growth of a service-centered economy – the share of national income that comes from labor unionshas been steadily falling since the 1970s. Union membership is at its lowest point in recent memory, with only 11.3% of Americans in unions. Critics, including the Center for American Progress blame those trends for the decline of the middle class.
Membership in unions is low for millennials – with only 11% of union members falling in the 25-34 age group, compared to 16% for workers between 55-64 – but their political views tend to align with the labor movement. A Pew poll this June showed 61% of Americans 18-24 in favor of unions, with strongest support coming from women and minority groups.
Diversity is more evident in the newer labor movement among millennials, reflecting the dominance of black and hispanic workers in unions nationally.
Jose Lopez, 27, is an organizer who works with Make the Road New York, mobilizing fast food and car wash workers. His previous work within the same organization involved pairing up young community members and artists with local businesses to paint storefronts, raising awareness about police brutality and stop-and-frisk. Lopez plans on bringing the same type of creativity to mobilize people around issues of inadequate income and wage theft, he said.
Protestor Janah Bailey, 21, of Chicago, currently works two fast food jobs: one full-time at Wendy’s, which she says pays $8.25 an hour, and one part-time at McDonald’s, which pays $8.40. On one day last year, Bailey walked out on both jobs for strikes against low pay. She says $15 an hour would change her life “tremendously”, expecting she would only have to work one job to make ends meet and help support her family, and spend her newly acquired spare time on studying to open up her own business.
The persistence of low wages is also mobilizing millennials who have never known a healthy job market. David Meni, 20, says he has held down a plethora of unpaid positions, internships and temporary jobs since his sophomore year of high school. His George Washington University chapter of the Roosevelt Institute’s Campus Network recently joined other local organizations in successfully pressuring the Washington DC city council to vote for an increase in the minimum wage to $11.50 an hour by 2016 from its current level of $8.50 an hour – despite the opposition of large corporations including Walmart.
That is not to say that young people will revolutionize the labor movement immediately. Millennials have an uphill battle in turning around the decline of labor. Studies show that while millennials support unions, until now, they have rarely joined them, perhaps in the belief that their low-paying jobs were temporary.
That perception may be changing as it becomes evident that lower wages are likely to be the norm for a long time.
Many economists predict that low wages are likely to continue into 2014, as pressure continues from corporate executives eager to return profits to their shareholders – namely by keeping a lid on expenses like pay. In a research report this week, influential economist Jan Hatzius of Goldman Sachs directly ties the 6.5% rise of corporate profits to the nearly inert 2% growth of US wages.
"The bottom line is that the favorable environment for corporate profits should persist for some time yet, and the case for an acceleration in the near term is strong," Hatzius wrote. "Eventually, the pendulum will swing back in the direction of lower profit margins and higher wages, but this still looks fairly distant."
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Black Lives Matter Releases Policy Demands, Includes Reparations And Abolishing The Death Penalty
On Monday, more than 60 organizations associated with the Black Lives Matter movement released a series of policy...
On Monday, more than 60 organizations associated with the Black Lives Matter movement released a series of policy demands, including free access to higher education, reparations, and an end to capital punishment.
According to the New York Times, these demands come on the heels of the second anniversary of Michael Brown’s death and after both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions.
“Our grievances and solutions extend beyond the police killing of our people; state violence includes failing schools that criminalize our children, dwindling earning opportunities, wars on our trans and queer family that deny them of their humanity, and so much more,” Montague Simmons of Organization for Black Struggle and the Movement for Black Lives Policy Table, said in a statement. “That’s why we united, with a renewed energy and purpose, to put forth a shared vision of the world we want to live in.”
The plan, titled “A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom and Justice,” offers up six core demands and 40 policy priorities, NBC News noted. They include:
Ending the War on Black People: This includes abolishing the death penalty, mass surveillance in communities of color, the privatization of police, violence against all Blacks (including Black trans, queer and gender nonconforming people) and using a past criminal history as a means to seek a job, housing, license and voting rights.
Reparations: To address the past and current harms that slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration have done to the Black community, BLM is seeking reparations for the wealth extracted from our communities, guaranteed livable income and free access and open admissions to public community colleges, universities, and technical schools, to name a few.
Invest-Divest: Instead of federal, state, and local monies being invested into prisons, police, surveillance, and exploitative corporations, BLM would rather see that invested into long-term safety strategies such as education, local restorative justice services, employment programs, and universal health care.
Economic Justice: This is calling for Black communities to have real collective ownership of wealth in the U.S. This could be achieved with restructuring tax codes, creating federal and state job programs that specifically target the most economically marginalized Black people, breaking up large banks and ensuring better protection for workers.
Community Control: This would include the end of the privatization of education and making sure communities have the power to hire and fire officers, determine disciplinary action, control budgets and policies, and subpoena relevant agency information when needed.
Political Power: To ensure that real democracy can be achieved for all Black people, BLM wants for all political prisoners to be released, eliminating Super Pacs that fund candidates, ensuring election protection, early registration at the age of 16, full access to technology and the internet, and increased funding to HBCU’s.
Marbre Stahly-Butts, who is part of the leadership team of the Movement for Black Lives Policy Table, told the Times that neither Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump have truly made strides to address these issues in their prospective campaigns.
“On both sides of aisle, the candidates have really failed to address the demands and the concerns of our people. So this was less about this specific political moment and this election, and more about how do we actually start to plant and cultivate the seeds of transformation of this country that go beyond individual candidates,” she said.
This plan also shows a sign of an evolution for the movement, which has been criticized in the past for not having a clear concise platform of how they want to usher in change. And now as the election continues, it’s about using these ideals to further hold the nation’s politicians accountable, Michaela Brown, communications director of Baltimore Bloc, stressed.
“We seek radical transformation, not reactionary reform. As the 2016 election continues, this platform provides us with a way to intervene with an agenda that resists state and corporate power, an opportunity to implement policies that truly value the safety and humanity of black lives, and an overall means to hold elected leaders accountable,” she said in statement.
We hope all these leaders are paying close attention.
By KELLEE TERRELL
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Progressive Activists Protest For A Cause You Should Hear More About, But Won't
More than a dozen community activists picketed the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia this week, protesting what they...
More than a dozen community activists picketed the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia this week, protesting what they say is the bank president’s refusal to meet with them to discuss how Fed monetary policy affects real people.
The roughly 15 activists are members of ACTION United, an organization representing low-income people of color in Philadelphia. ACTION United is affiliated with the national Fed Up campaign, a coalition of progressive groups advocating Fed monetary policies that prioritize full employment and shared economic prosperity.
Fed Up and ACTION United planned Tuesday's protest because they say that Philadelphia Fed President Patrick Harker reneged on a promise to meet, and allow group members to give him a tour of low-income neighborhoods where they are active. The activists point to a video in which Harker appears to commit to the meeting in a conversation with ACTION United organizer Kendra Brooks at the annual Jackson Hole symposium in August.
When Brooks followed up, Theresa Singleton, the Philadelphia Fed’s vice president and community affairs officer, said in an email obtained by HuffPost that a meeting was not in the cards, because the bank is reluctant to work with “just one organization."
Instead, Singleton invited Brooks to Tuesday’s community development briefing for low- and moderate-income community stakeholders. Singleton also said Fed staff would “design and organize” their own community tour.
That response rankled Fed Up and ACTION United members. The Federal Reserve has a dozen regional banks, and the activists have met or have planned meetings with all of the regional Fed leaders except Philadelphia's since the campaign began in August 2014. They want a meeting -- and they want it to take place in an economically distressed community of color -- not in the Fed’s offices.
So they decided to pressure the Philadelphia Fed with a protest, featuring Fed Up’s trademark “What recovery?” signs and green "Whose Recovery?" T-shirts.
ACTION United also sent Brooks to the community development briefing, where she and several nonprofit executives and bankers who work with low- and moderate-income earners spoke with Harker and Singleton.
Brooks said she was mostly pleased with what she heard from Harker and other Fed officials, who she said sounded genuinely committed to researching the conditions in communities the Fed serves and finding ways to improve “economic autonomy” in the Philadelphia region.
“The outcome of the meeting was much better than we anticipated, but going in, we did not know the information that we knew coming out.” Brooks said. “We hope he will continue to keep the doors open for organizations like ours and our coalition. And that we will continue to be a part of that conversation and not excluded.”
But Brooks noted that the Fed officials did not discuss how monetary policy and the Fed’s adjustment of interest rates disproportionately affects low-income workers and communities of color.
For the Fed Up campaign, the exclusion of monetary policy reaffirms that nothing short of a meeting between Harker and activists will suffice.
“We appreciate and accept the invitation to discuss community development and research, but this is not a substitute for the promise President Harker made to Fed Up,” said Shawn Sebastian, a policy advocate and staff attorney for the Fed Up campaign. “President Harker promised to speak with working families in the black neighborhoods of Philadelphia about their experiences -- where unemployment is double white unemployment. Harker promised to discuss how his monetary policy decisions can build a true full employment economy that works for everyone.”
Philadelphia Fed spokeswoman Marilyn Wimp, in an email to HuffPost, didn't address a question about whether Harker reneged on his promise to meet with protesters. She instead pointed to Tuesday's briefing as evidence of Harker's interest in reaching out to diverse parts of the community.
But the list of the Tuesday briefing’s attendees reveals that Brooks was the only stakeholder from a group with a position on Fed interest rates.
Crafting monetary policy is a main responsibility of the Federal Reserve regional banks. Regional Fed presidents occupy five of the 12 seats on the Federal Open Market Committee, responsible for adjusting the Fed’s benchmark interest rates. Lately, they have accounted for half of the committee’s votes, because the Senate has failed to approve presidential nominees for two of the seven seats reserved for members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in Washington.
The FOMC keeps its benchmark interest rates low when it is more concerned about full employment, and raises them to curb excessive inflation when the economy has grown enough to drive up prices.
Fed Up wants the central bank to maintain current low interest rates for the near term, which will allow economic demand to continue to grow, benefitting workers with more jobs and higher wages. The campaign applauded the Fed’s decision to leave rates unchanged in September.
But Fed Up leaders said they're worried about the Philadelphia Fed and the role its president may play in future monetary policy decisions. The Philadelphia region's previous Fed president, Charles Plosser, who left the post in March, was an outspoken inflation hawk.
Harker, who will serve a one-year term on the FOMC in 2017, was a member of the Philadelphia Fed board’s search committee for a new president, recusing himself once he became a candidate.
Harker’s views on monetary policy are not yet known. He is a former trustee of the Goldman Sachs Trust, which Sebastian and other Fed Up critics said they worry will make him more sympathetic to financial institutions' concerns about inflation.
Source: Huffington Post
Yellen to Meet Group Seeking Low Rates, Greater Openness
Bloomberg News - November 11, 2014, by Christopher Condon - Federal Reserve Chair ...
Bloomberg News - November 11, 2014, by Christopher Condon - Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen will meet Nov. 14 with a coalition of community groups, labor unions and faith leaders seeking to influence monetary policy and the way some Fed officials are appointed.
The group has called for the Fed to place greater weight on lowering unemployment. They also want more public say in the appointment of district Fed leaders, just as regional Fed presidents in Dallas and Philadelphia plan to retire next year.
“The most important thing is to keep interest rates low,” said Shawn Sebastian, a policy advocate at the Brooklyn-based Center for Popular Democracy, one of the organizers. “The hawks in the Fed are pushing hard to raise rates soon, but most people in the public realize we are not three months away from a recovery.”
The meeting comes as the Fed moves closer to a decision on when to raise interest rates for the first time since 2006.
Unemployment fell to 5.8 percent in October, and most Federal Open Market Committee officials expect the U.S. central bank will lift its benchmark rate at some point next year, after leaving it near zero since December 2008.
The organizers look to add to pressure on the central bank to be more transparent. The Fed has come in for criticism from Congress, where Republicans have proposed legislation limiting its discretion on monetary policy and banking supervision. Congress has already curbed the Fed’s emergency lending powers.
The FOMC, the Fed’s main policy-setting panel, has 12 voting seats. Eight of those are reserved for the bank’s board of governors and the president of the New YorkFed. The heads of the other 11 regional banks rotate through four remaining spots.
Regional Feds
The governors are appointed by the U.S. president and confirmed by the Senate. Regional bank heads are picked by their respective boards, which are typically dominated by business executives. The group meeting with Yellen say there should be more public input when Philadelphia’s Charles Plosser and Dallas’s Richard Fisherstep down in 2015.
“The Dallas Fed needs to create a transparent and inclusive process for selecting” a new president, Danny Cendejas, an organizer at the Texas Organizing Project, said in a statement. “Members of the public have the right to know who is making this crucial decision and what criteria they are using.”
The group sent an open letter to Yellen, and to the Philadelphia and Dallas boards, demanding more transparency and public engagement.
Marilyn Wimp, a spokeswoman for the Philadelphia Fed, said in an e-mail the bank had received the letter. She declined to comment further. James Hoard, spokesman for the Dallas Fed, didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment.
Plosser and Fisher have been among Fed officials favoring raising rates sooner to prevent inflation and financial-instability pressures from building.
Source
Jill Cicero and Elizabeth Nicolas: Women in the legal profession
Jill Cicero and Elizabeth Nicolas: Women in the legal profession
Jill Cicero, president of the Monroe County Bar Association, and managing partner of Cicero Law Firm LLP, and Elizabeth...
Jill Cicero, president of the Monroe County Bar Association, and managing partner of Cicero Law Firm LLP, and Elizabeth Nicolas, a worker’s rights attorney with the Center for Popular Democracy, and former staff attorney for the Empire Justice Center, talk about continuing discrimination, harassment and bias in the office and in court.
Listen to the conversation here.
ABQ call center workers get more family-friendly workplace rules
More than workers at Albuquerque’s T-Mobile call center began working under new workplace rules this week. The company...
More than workers at Albuquerque’s T-Mobile call center began working under new workplace rules this week. The company has been under increasing pressure to modify work rules to give workers greater flexibility to balance family and work requirements.
The company operates a nationwide call center near Jefferson and Menaul in Albuquerque and recently announced plans to add more employees top the more than 1,500 local workers already employed at the site.
News of the new workplace rules came from the Communications Workers of America which has been leading efforts with local organizations for these changes:
For Immediate Release July 2, 2015
Public Pressure Pushes T-Mobile US to Provide Fairer Paid Parental Leave Policy
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Responding to growing public pressure and local government initiatives, T-Mobile US announced this week that it would be adopt a paid parental leave program. The company also said it would end an oppressive policy that required call center workers to be on the phone 96.5% of their work time, leaving them with virtually no time for follow up on customer issues or to make changes in customers’ accounts as needed.
This is great news for workers who often must struggle to balance family and career. It comes as workers at T-Mobile US and a coalition of community supporters in cities like Albuquerque, N.M., step up efforts to restore a fair workweek and achieve other improvements for workers.
Members of TU, the union of T-Mobile workers, the Communications Workers of America and many organizations, including the Center for Popular Democracy, OLÉ and other coalition partners, have been raising concerns about unfair scheduling and other issues for workers at T-Mobile US and other employers. Workers want a voice in the decisions that affect them in their workplace — not just the ones that the company selectively picks and chooses. That’s why T-Mobile US workers are joining TU.
T-Mobile US’s initial scheduling changes were made just as the Albuquerque City Council was moving forward to consider a proposal to implement paid sick leave and scheduling improvements. The Albuquerque coalition hosted a town hall meeting on irregular scheduling, where Albuquerque City Council members pledged to support their fight for a fair workweek including the right to take sick leave without retaliation.
A recent National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) decision found T-Mobile guilty of engaging in illegal employment policies that prevented workers from even talking to each other about problems on the job. The judge ordered the company to rescind those policies and inform all 46,000 employees about the verdict.
Parental leave is a good first step toward helping workers balance their career and family responsibilities. But workers want real bargaining rights and the right to fairly choose union representation. That’s what T-Mobile must realize.
Source: The New Mexico Political Report
Rep. Blanc arrested, then released following D.C. demonstration
Rep. Blanc arrested, then released following D.C. demonstration
Blanc was in Washington participating in a sit-in along with advocates from Living United For Change in Arizona, or...
Blanc was in Washington participating in a sit-in along with advocates from Living United For Change in Arizona, or LUCHA, and national groups like United We Dream and Center for Popular Democracy. The groups demanded that Congress pass a comprehensive immigration reform bill protecting the more than 700,000 young undocumented immigrants protected under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program or DACA.
Read the full article here.
3 days ago
3 days ago