CPD IN THE NEWS

From 2015 to 2018, the homeless population in Los Angeles rose from less than 29,000 to 59,000. Many of those homeless Angelenos were formerly incarcerated, and many will again be incarcerated for being homeless. Yet, according to the Center for Popular Democracy’s “Freedom to Thrive” report, Los Angeles spends 25.7% of its general fund budget on policing compared to a mere 3 percent to support nondepartmental “General City Purposes,” which includes city council spending on jobs, youth, homeless services, and substance abuse programs.

Read the full article here.

Among millennials, voter turnout in Illinois ranks 47th in the country, according to the political advocacy group Common Cause. In the 2014 primary election, their turnout in Chicago wards was as low as 9 percent.

We don’t have to settle for such low numbers.

Illinois should look to Oregon and California, which recently approved automatic voter registration. Oregon did it in March and California OKd it just a week ago.

Under automatic voter registration, people are automatically registered when they get or update a driver’s license or state identification card. An opt-out provision is included for people who don’t want to register.

Illinois has 9.7 million residents who are eligible to vote, but 2.1 million of them are not registered, state Sen. Andy Manar, D-Decatur, said last week at a meeting of the Senate Executive Subcommittee.

Automatically adding unregistered people to the voting rolls could drive up voter turnout. It also would help county clerks by automatically updating voter addresses when people move and update their driver’s licenses. The Center for Popular Democracy  estimates that nationwide automatic voter registration system would add 56 million voters to the rolls.

Cook County Clerk David Orr argues government has a responsibility to use technology to improve the voting process.

“Nowadays the burden should be on the government,” Orr says.

Exactly.

Source: Chicago Sun-Times

OZY - December 23, 2013, by Pooja Bhatia - For decades, talk about economic inequality was taboo. Those who tried were met with accusations of sour grapes, inciting class warfare, or — gasp! — advocating socialism.

But such rhetorical bludgeons appear to have lost force in recent years, and words like “inequality” and “economic fairness” have at last found a place at the table of mainstream American political discourse. It’s not quite the head of the table, but it’s not the servants’ quarters either. 

Words like “inequality” and “economic fairness” have at last found a place at the table of mainstream American political discourse.

“The core issue of economic justice has been getting more traction now than during most of my time in organizing,” says Andrew Friedman, who’s been a progressive organizer for more than 15 years and now co-directs the Center for Popular Democracy in New York. Derecka Mehrens, executive director of labor-oriented think tank Working Partnerships USA in San Jose, Calif., agrees: “There’s been a sea change in how and even whether we talk about inequality.”

The signs are everywhere. In his November apostolic exhortation, the pope warned of the “tyranny” of unfettered capitalism and called “an economy of exclusion and inequality” sinful. Clear majorities of Americans support hiking the minimum wage and other policies that aim to reduce the wealth gap. Earlier this month, President Obama positioned inequality and lack of social mobility as the “defining issue of our time.” Mayors-elect of major cities all made economic inequality central to their platforms. And this year’s National Book Award for nonfiction went to George Packer’s The Unwinding, which chronicles rising social and economic inequality in the United States.  

Inequality talk is no longer off-limits for a simple reason: The lot of many has stagnated or worsened over the past decade, in some cases severely. 

Some credit the 2011 Occupy movements for popularizing economic inequality. (Or blame it, depending on their perspective.) But the main reason inequality talk is no longer off-limits is probably simpler: The lot of many has stagnated or worsened over the past decade, in some cases severely. Some 10 million people lost their homes in the Great Recession. Although unemployment is at a five-year low, the decline is partly because many have stopped looking for work.

As OZY noted a few weeks ago, the lag between technical “recovery” and job growth is lengthening, and these days it’s lingering four to five years. No wonder the Great Recession’s rough ride seems endless. Moreover, while worker productivity has increased over the past decade, real wages have stagnated or declined — leaving the average worker to wonder just where the gains from productivity are going.

“They hear the news that the stock market is climbing and say, Oh really?” Mehrens says.

Lovely A. Warren won election as mayor of Rochester last month with a campaign lamenting what she called the “two Rochesters,” challenged by crime and poverty, but also boasting prosperous neighborhoods.

Economic inequality has been growing since at least the early 1980s. But it was harder to complain about during the Clinton years, when broad-based growth lifted all boats, yachts and dinghies alike. Economic inequality grew during the Bush years too, but those were the days of subprime homeownership and plasma TVs for all. Five years after the collapse of that easy-credit economy, most Americans are still hurting. The average household has recovered less than half the wealth it lost during the recession.

As a result, income inequality has become a winning issue in some cities. The mayors-elect of New York, Pittsburgh and Minneapolis made economic justice a central plank of their platforms — and did so despite naysayers and with newfound success. New York Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio’s “tale of two cities,” for instance, was not much different from Fernando Ferrer’s campaign theme in 2005 or Ruth Messinger’s in 1997 — but only in the New York of 2013 did it resonate. 

It was harder to complain about during the Clinton years, when broad-based growth lifted all boats, yachts and dinghies alike.

Not that the discursive war has been won, mind you. Plenty of people and conservative think tanks still argue that inequality has nothing to do with poverty. Winning a war of words wouldn’t be enough anyway, organizers say: “We need to figure out how to use this sea change in how we talk about inequality to how we act against inequality,” says Mehrens.

The newfound cache of certain phrases has had some perverse effects. Developers and other big employers have latched onto terms like “living wage” but not always with worker-friendly intentions, says Lee Strieb, a researcher with labor organization Unite Here. Developers have “attempted to wrap themselves in the flag of the living wage, almost as a shield to avoid unionization,” says Strieb. ”There is a heightened sensitivity to the need to address [the wage] issue — but to the extent they can address it in a superficial way, they will.” 

Mr. de Blasio’s relentless critique of economic inequality in New York seemed to resonate with voters, who elected him in a landslide.

The shift could signal a readiness to engage meaningfully with issues like the living wage or tax increases on top earners. 

It’s unclear whether 2014 will set in motion changes to our income distribution. Mayors alone may have little power to tackle the issue. They usually can’t run big deficits and, in cities like San Francisco and New York, space for affordable housing is hard to find. Most important, mayors can’t singlehandedly restore the middle-class jobs that disappeared during the recession.

Yet the shift in tone and rhetoric is significant and could signal a readiness to engage meaningfully with issues like the living wage or tax increases on top earners. Consider Cam Kruse, 72, a mostly retired civil engineer who is active in ISAIAH, a social justice organization of about 100 churches in metropolitan Minneapolis. Kruse believes in small government. When working full time, he perched in the top one to three percent of earners. And he was a Republican for most of his adult life.

But earlier this year he found himself urging the state legislature to raise tax rates on top earners, which, he said, had fallen through the decades. Growing “gaps” in education, health, housing and transportation worried him. “My success, and that of all the other top earners in Minnesota, has been based on the investments that people before us made,” he testified. “It is our turn to give back and make investments for those who will be our future.” 

The tax increase passed.  

Atlanta, located in the heart of the South, was a center of the civil rights movement, became a corporate hub of the New South economy, and boasts a large black professional class.

Can it help break the Federal Reserve's color barrier?

Dennis Lockhart's retirement early next year as head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta has spotlighted the selection of his replacement as members of Congress and a coalition of activist groups call for an aggressive search among blacks and Latinos with finance or economics expertise.

African-Americans have served on the Federal Reserve's Washington-based Board of Governors three times in the Fed's 103-year history, and the central bank now has a female chair, Janet Yellen.

But none of the regional banks have ever been run by a black or Latino, a lack of diversity some argue is worrisome on its face and could make the system as a whole less attentive to how policy impacts less advantaged communities.

"Grave racial disparities exist across our nation in unemployment, wages and income. ... It is critical that incoming leadership ... be committed to doing more," four African-American members of the House of Representatives wrote in a letter this week to Yellen and Thomas Fanning, chair of the Atlanta Fed's private board of directors.

"Lockhart's recent retirement announcement presents an opportunity to enhance and expand the Federal Reserve's leadership," they said in the letter.

In a public webcast on Thursday, Fanning said he wants to hold "one of the most transparent processes ever," and that the search committee has already received nominations from the public at large.

As in other districts, the search will be national in scope. There is no requirement that the head of the Atlanta Fed come from the bank's southeastern region, and the 12 regional Fed banks often bring in a president from outside their own geographic area.

Executive search firm SpencerStuart has been hired to run the search. Consultant John Harpole said the firm has helped place 1,600 women, minorities and other "underrepresented groups" in corporate positions, and would cast a wide net among local institutions, national organizations and its "strong network" of sitting executives to find candidates.

The issue is sensitive for the Fed, whose policies affect every citizen but which is designed to be immune from the day-to-day politics that influence other U.S. government agencies.

Group says Fed is unaccountable 

Because monetary policy focuses on influencing interest rates that apply nationwide, Fed officials say it is too blunt a tool to address issues like the persistent gap between unemployment rates for blacks and white.

Activists counter that those sorts of problems might improve if unemployment was driven as low as possible — even at the risk of higher inflation. The Fed sets policy with two goals in mind, low employment and stable inflation of around 2 percent annually.

The U.S. unemployment rate in August, the latest month for which data is available, was 4.9 percent.

A labor-affiliated coalition of civic groups, known as Fed Up, has taken the argument even further, arguing that the Fed's very structure makes it unaccountable.

The regional banks in particular have supervisory power over local financial institutions as well as a voice in national policymaking, but are set up as private entities owned by the banks they oversee. The regional bank presidents are chosen by a local board of directors, though the choice must be approved by the Fed governors in Washington.

In a meeting with civic activists in August, New York Fed President William Dudley agreed the institution had done a "pretty lousy" job of promoting diversity. But Fed officials in general argue that the current structure has worked well, and that changes would need to offer clear advantages without risking the central bank's independence.

In that environment, the Atlanta Fed appointment will be watched closely. Though many regional bank heads come from within the broader Fed system, tapped from its ready pool of economists with doctoral degrees, Lockhart had a varied career in private equity and banking before taking over the Atlanta Fed 10 years ago.

And while the search will be national, Atlanta has a deep pool of black professionals - 10 percent of African-Americans in the city have a graduate or professional degree, three percentage points higher than the national average.

"That would be a great thing," Fanning said. "We want the best person as well."

By Howard Schneider

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