FL-Sen: Nelson (D) Refuses To Let Trump Privatize Air Traffic Control, PCCC Pushes Dems To Join Him
FL-Sen: Nelson (D) Refuses To Let Trump Privatize Air Traffic Control, PCCC Pushes Dems To Join Him
Here’s another big fight to get ready for: "President Donald Trump threw his weight behind a proposal to privatize the...
Here’s another big fight to get ready for:
"President Donald Trump threw his weight behind a proposal to privatize the nation’s air traffic control system on Monday, and a White House adviser called the multibillion dollar effort “low-hanging fruit” that can get through Congress quickly.
Florida Sen. Bill Nelson doesn’t see it that way."
Read the full article here.
Forum Held On Report That Calls For Minimum Wage Raise To $10 An Hour
NY1 - A forum was held Wednesday at the CUNY...
NY1 - A forum was held Wednesday at the CUNY Murphy Institute on a new report by United New York and the Center for Popular Democracy that recommends increasing the city's minimum wage to $10 an hour.
It also calls for earned sick leave, schedule predictability, and passing legislation that allows the city to adjust its own minimum wage above that of the state.
The report focused mostly on service industry jobs.
"This is a moment in New York City where we can finally demand that this be a city that stands up for low-wage workers and doesn't shy away from that role," said Deborah Axt of Make the Road New York.
"If we are to maintain our progressive reputation as the bright shining star, then New York City really needs to claim a lot of the recommendations that came out of this forum here today," said City Councilwoman Letitia James, whose district covers part of Brooklyn.
The report said that the city's unemployment rate rose from 5 to 10 percent since 2007, while its homeless population has doubled since 1992.
It also found that real median income is down $3,000 since 2008.
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Fed Officials to Meet With Activists Ahead of Jackson Hole Conference
Fed Officials to Meet With Activists Ahead of Jackson Hole Conference
When Federal Reserve officials gather for the Kansas City Fed’s high-profile policy conference in Jackson Hole, Wyo....
When Federal Reserve officials gather for the Kansas City Fed’s high-profile policy conference in Jackson Hole, Wyo. this week, some of them will start with an unprecedented event.
On Thursday, eight central bankers, among them Fed governor Lael Brainard and New York Fed President William Dudley, will meet with and answer questions from about 120 activists from the Campaign for Popular Democracy’s Fed Up Campaign, a left-leaning group working to change the way the powerful central bank works.
The meeting marks a turn for the invitation-only Jackson Hole symposium, which draws top central bankers and economists from around the world to discuss monetary policy issues behind closed doors. Though journalists cover the proceedings and Fed officials give press interviews on the sidelines, this is the first time the Kansas City Fed, which hosts the event, has organized a public forum for policy makers to meet with their critics beforehand.
“My sense is that we are starting to see real changes, ”said Ady Barkan, leader of the Fed Up campaign. He said he was prompted to launch the effort after realizing how little public attention was focused on the U.S. central bank, which directly affects the lives of U.S. workers, consumers, home buyers, business owners and investors.
Formally launched in 2014, the coalition of policy activists, labor and community groups has lobbied the Fed to keep interest rates very low to ensure the economic recovery benefits all Americans and not just the well off. The group has called for more diversity among the central bank’s predominantly white, male leadership; more openness about how regional Fed bank presidents are chosen and changes in the Fed’s century-old structure to reduce the influence of the banking industry.
Mr. Barkan, a 32-year-old lawyer, recalled wondering how to get the public to care about “the absurdly opaque issue” of Fed policy. He found more interest that he expected. Speaking with community groups, he found “everybody is fascinated, everybody gets the importance of it.”
The group has gained a notable amount of high-level access. Its members met in November 2014 with Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen and several Fed governors, and later with Fed staff. Fed Up members have met with all 12 regional Fed bank presidents, even conducting public events with some, as it did with the Minneapolis Fed’s Neel Kashkari in early August.
The regional Fed bank leaders have largely welcomed their meetings with Fed Up. “I’ve been at the Fed 22 years. When you’ve been at an institution that long it is hard to know how other people view you” and how your policies play out in the real world, San Francisco Fed President John Williams told reporters in July.
“Understanding the perspectives of people outside of financial markets, outside of our own circles—that’s healthy,” Mr. Williams said. “Hearing what I think is supposed to be constructive criticism is healthy.”
Over the past year, Fed Up also has met regularly with lawmakers and their staff on Capitol Hill, held press briefings in front of the central bank’s Washington, D.C., offices and stacked congressional hearings with activists wearing their trademark green shirts.
Among the results: A large number of congressional Democrats and the campaign of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton have echoed Fed Up’s call for barring bankers from the boards that oversee the regional Fed banks and urged the central bank to focus more on promoting job growth. The Democratic legislators have recently expressed concerns over a lack of diversity among Fed leaders.
In congressional hearings in February, House and Senate Democrats peppered Ms. Yellen with more questions than in the past on issues such as inequality, stagnant wages and jobless rates for low-income Americans.
“For black Americans, we’re still in the midst of a very serious depression or recession,” Rep. Keith Ellison (D., Minn.), a member of the Congressional Black Caucus who had met with Fed Up, told Ms. Yellen in February.
When she returned to Capitol Hill in June, Ms. Yellen came armed with data and talking points addressing the diverging economic circumstances between white and black and Hispanic households.
“It’s important for us to be aware of those differences and to focus on them as we think about monetary policy and work that the Federal Reserve does in the area of community development,” she said.
That contrasted with Ms. Yellen’s previous comments that the Fed’s options for addressing the economic troubles of minority groups were limited. Some Fed watchers said her shift in tone suggests policy makers are paying closer attention to such concerns.
The gestures may not seem like much to outsiders, but to people familiar with the Fed—an institution that is slow to change and resistant to criticism—they are viewed as a significant shift.
“It’s kind of monumental to get the Fed to change,” said Sarah Binder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, noting the creation last year of an advisory council at the Fed focused on the concerns of low-income communities.
That said, a number of the Fed bank presidents have argued against the structural reforms Fed Up is advocating. In May, Mr. Dudley said “the current arrangements are actually working quite well, both in terms of preserving the Federal Reserve’s independence with respect to the conduct of monetary policy and actually leading to pretty, you know, successful outcomes.”
Atlanta Fed President Dennis Lockhart expressed skepticism about the call for more openness about the selection of regional reserve bank chiefs.
“When it comes to picking new bank presidents, are you going to get that with a completely open process much like an election? I don’t think these are roles that should be filled by public election,” he said.
Fed Up’s funding comes primarily from the Open Philanthropy Project, which provides grants and funds to projects on justice reform, immigration and economics. Open Philanthropy committed $1 million toward Fed Up’s 2016 budget. In 2015 Open Philanthropy donated $750,000 toward Fed Up’s $1.1 million annual budget. Dustin Moskovitz, a Facebook co-founder who left that firm in 2008, is one of the primary sources of Open Philanthropy’s funds.
Some former central bankers worry Fed Up has unreasonable expectations in a world in which central bank policy can’t change economic fundamentals such as long-run growth in productivity, output or wages. They also fret it was the Fed itself, via its response to the financial crisis, that created the perception it has the tools to affect more than short-term fluctuations in inflation and hiring.
Charles Plosser, former president of the Philadelphia Fed, said the Fed officials, through word and deed, “continually raised expectations about what they can do.” And having made the public believe it was more powerful that it actually is, officials “are setting themselves up for exactly this sort of attack” by those who want more out of the Fed.
Former Dallas Fed leader Richard Fisher said he had long warned that ultra-aggressive Fed stimulus policies that he said primarily benefited the rich would end up “stoking the fires of populism.”
The Fed has faced populist critics before. What is different about Fed Up, Ms. Binder said, is it seems to be well-funded and well-organized and have a constructive agenda, as opposed to some groups who have called for abolishing the Fed or limiting its powers.
“They’re kind of working through the system in a way, which is to say, ‘Look, [Congress has told the Fed] to care equally about inflation and jobs—it’s not time to give up on jobs,’” she said.
Corrections & Amplifications:
Rep. Keith Ellison is a Democratic congressman from Minnesota. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a Republican. (Aug. 25)
By Michael S. Derby and Kate Davidson
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In Minneapolis, a Strong ‘Fair Scheduling’ Law for Workers Runs Into a Corporate Roadblock
Less than a year after San Francisco passed a first-of-its-kind fair scheduling ordinance for retail employers,...
Less than a year after San Francisco passed a first-of-its-kind fair scheduling ordinance for retail employers, progressive activists in Minneapolis began pushing for an even stronger scheduling ordinance of their own—along with paid sick leave, wage theft protections, and the possibility of a $15 minimum wage.
But the campaign, dubbed the Working Families Agenda, ran into a roadblock earlier this month when its most powerful political ally, Mayor Betsy Hodges, decided to abandon the fair scheduling component. Language in the proposed ordinance called for scheduling notice of at least two weeks in advance and extra “predictability pay” for workers who were scheduled after that threshold.
Those requirements quickly awoke the local business lobby, typically a fairly dormant political power in a city with a strong progressive streak. In late September, opponents formed the Workforce Fairness Coalition by the Chamber of Commerce, and included prominent members like the Minnesota Business Partnership (which represents about 80 businesses, including Target, U.S. Bancorp and Xcel Energy) and the Minnesota Restaurant Association. They took specific issue with the scheduling law, saying that it would impede operations and could force businesses to flee the city.
Many progressive activists don’t buy that argument.
“We heard the same arguments from the Chamber of Commerce that are being made in Minneapolis,” says Gordon Mar, who led the campaign to pass San Francisco’s Retail Worker Bill of Rights, which includes fair scheduling. “As we’ve been implementing the law, those arguments have proven to be just as hollow as they were in business’s opposition to other worker-friendly laws."
Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges ran in 2013 on a campaign that promised to directly address the city’s stark racial disparities, aspiring for a “One Minneapolis.” The city has some of the largest gaps in the country between whites and people of color for a number of indicators including rates of high school graduation, homeownership, low-level arrests and employment.
Those disparities are rampant in the workplace, too. For example, 63 percent of white workers in Minneapolis have access to earned sick time compared with just 32 percent of Latino workers. A Minnesota Department of Health report found that 79 percent of food workers—many of whom are minorities—lacked paid sick time.
In her 2015 State of the City address just six months ago, Hodges outlined an agenda she said would address economic disparities, specifically calling for an ambitious plan to implement fair scheduling, wage theft protection and paid sick leave. But since then, Hodges appears to have taken business’s concerns to heart.
“When it comes to fair, predictable scheduling, I have heard from many people, including many business owners, that the issue is complicated and that more time is needed to engage in this important issue,” the mayor said in a statement on October 14. “As a result, I have come to the conclusion that we are not in a position to resolve the concerns satisfactorily on the timeline currently contemplated.”
While Hodges pledged to continue pushing for paid sick leave and wage theft enforcement, activists felt blindsided by her sudden retreat.
“Our progressive champions were not prepared for the pushback and frankly folded under the pressure, … caving to conservative business elements,” says Anthony Newby, executive director for Minnesota Neighborhoods Organizing for Change, a member of the coalition supporting these policies. “Where does [Hodges] want to be allied? With working people or with the worst actors of the business community?”
The day after Hodges’ announcement, about 300 people streamed into City Hall in downtown Minneapolis to reaffirm support for all aspects of the Working Families Agenda. Workers and organizers spoke about the daily burdens of low-wage work and how they contribute to the racial disparities that plague a city often portrayed as a progressive wonderland. Minneapolis NAACP President Nekima Levy-Pounds described the city’s situation as a tale of two cities: “It’s the best of times if you’re white and the worst of times if you’re black.”
While the scheduling law language had not been set in stone, many businesses were concerned with its details. At first, advanced notice for schedules was set at four weeks, which was eventually scaled back to two. For every change an employer made to a worker’s schedule within two weeks of the shift, that worker would earn an hour’s wage worth of “predictability pay.” For any schedule change within 24 hours of a shift, a worker would get four hours’ pay.
Opponents were quick to cast this as an unrealistic policy with a costly burden placed on employers, and would be completely unworkable for restaurants, retailers and many other businesses that they say are dependent on “flexible” scheduling models. Advocates are quick to point out, though, that current workplace scheduling standards put all the cost on workers. For example, if a worker relies on childcare during her shifts and an employer tells her to stay late, many childcare centers charge fees for late pickups; or, having already spent money on childcare and transit, she could arrive at work to find her shift has been cut.
On fair scheduling, says Elianne Farhat with the Center for Popular Democracy’s Fair Workweek Initiative, it’s clear there’s going to be a cost. “What gets lost in the conversation is that it’s not that there isn’t a cost right now— it’s just that the workers are bearing that cost,” Farhat says. “What [fair scheduling] is trying to do is balance that cost.”
Despite Hodges’ call for more time to parse out details on scheduling, activists aren’t backing off. Her announcement seems to have galvanized many local organizations that previously were on the fence. Organizers say they will continue to advocate for paid sick leave and wage theft protections in the immediate future while aiming for an eventual victory on fair scheduling.
Compromises will likely need to be made. While San Francisco’s scheduling law applied only to big chain stores, Minneapolis’s fair scheduling proposal is universal. That may need to be scaled back, according to activists: Some added flexibility for “predictability pay” requirements may be needed, and further discussion about phase-in periods for smaller businesses will likely be coming. But organizers say they didn’t expect an easy path to passing the strongest scheduling law in the country. In fact, at a city council meeting last week two members announced a plan to refer the proposed paid sick leave policy to a new committee made up of workers, labor leaders, employers and business associations that would meet in mid-November and hash out details.
“‘No’ is not an answer. The question is what does it take to get a yes,” says Newby. “We need to figure out what is that sweet spot that’s gonna work for us. That may take a little bit more time.”
Source: In These Times
National advocacy groups are backing the sick-leave effort in Texas
National advocacy groups are backing the sick-leave effort in Texas
National advocacy groups based mostly in Washington, D.C., and Brooklyn, N.Y., were responsible for $1.8 million of the...
National advocacy groups based mostly in Washington, D.C., and Brooklyn, N.Y., were responsible for $1.8 million of the $2.5 million contributed and loaned to the political action committee leading the effort to mandate paid sick leave for workers in Texas...The other major outside donors include...$95,000, Center for Popular Democracy, Brooklyn, N.Y.
Read the full article here.
No Factions in Foxholes
By focusing chiefly on the surge in middle-class activism, says Andrew Friedman of the Center for Popular Democracy,...
By focusing chiefly on the surge in middle-class activism, says Andrew Friedman of the Center for Popular Democracy, the news media are overlooking a similar surge “in many of these front-line communities, brown and black communities, working-class communities.”
Read full article here.
Extras
The city of Saratoga Springs is considering a ban on the sale of guns and ammunition at the City Center, Mayor Meg...
The city of Saratoga Springs is considering a ban on the sale of guns and ammunition at the City Center, Mayor Meg Kelly announced this weekend in a welcoming speech to Local Progress New York.
Read the full article here.
U.S. Cities Issue IDs to Protect Undocumented Immigrants
To help combat such unintended outcomes, the Center for Popular Democracy has consulted with policymakers and advocates...
To help combat such unintended outcomes, the Center for Popular Democracy has consulted with policymakers and advocates—including those from Poughkeepsie—who seek to start municipal ID programs. In 2015, the organization published a municipal ID toolkit listing a series of best practices for local governments to follow.
Read the full article here.
Fed Up on Nightly Business Report
Nightly Business Report - November 11, 2014 ...
Nightly Business Report - November 11, 2014
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Can Community Organizers Build Progressive Power?
Last Tuesday, Alton Sterling was shot and killed while pinned on the ground by Baton Rouge police. The next day,...
Last Tuesday, Alton Sterling was shot and killed while pinned on the ground by Baton Rouge police. The next day, Philando Castile was shot and killed by a cop in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, as he reached for his ID. On Thursday, protests swept across the country calling for an end to police killings of black and brown men. At one of those peaceful protests, in Dallas, a sniper opened fire from a vantage point above the march, trying to kill white police officers. Five officers died.
It was against this backdrop of deep social turmoil that dozens of community organizing groups from across the country came together in Pittsburgh for the People’s Convention.
Over the weekend, more than 1,500 community organizers and leaders—many of them Black and Latino—convened to discuss ways to create a more cohesive, powerful progressive grassroots network. It was the first step by the Center for Popular Democracy, a progressive organization that is trying to fill the vacuum left in the wake of ACORN’s demise in 2010.
On top of the recent events in Louisiana, Minnesota, and Texas, the convention also came at a critical political moment—on the Republican side, Donald Trump’s campaign is increasingly stoking racial animosity; on the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders has worked to push his party’s platform leftward.
“We wanted to make it both a statement in the electoral moment and really a statement that transcends the electoral moment,” Brian Kettenring, co-director of the Center for Popular Democracy, told the Prospect at the convention. “We’re trying to stand in this particular moment but also not be captive to the narrow partisan politics of our country.”
The convention started off Friday with a march of more than 1,000 activists through the streets of downtown Pittsburgh, including stops outside the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center to demand fair wages for workers; the Pittsburgh Federal Reserve to call for equitable economic policies for working families; and Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey’s office to protest his anti-immigration stances. Some onlookers joined the chanting—“What do we want? Justice. If we don’t get it? Shut it down,”—and raised their fists in solidarity. Others were visibly angry at the marchers’ message of justice for undocumented immigrants and victims of police brutality.
The following day, activists heard speeches from heavyweights of the progressive movement like Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison and the Reverend William Barber III, leader of North Carolina’s Moral Mondays movement, who both spoke powerfully about the recent killings and the need for a unified response.
“The country needs healing, but you can’t heal a dirty wound,” Ellison pronounced. “A dirty wound needs disinfectant.”
He pointed to the “amazingly poised” Diamond Reynolds, the fiancée of Philando Castile, who streamed the immediate aftermath of his shooting on Facebook, as a model for the movement. “We need to push back with the same presence of mind of Diamond Reynolds,” he said.
With the killings of Sterling and Castile fresh on everyone’s mind, the specter of police violence loomed large at the convention. But the People’s Convention also wove together the threads of today’s social justice movements—not just Black Lives Matter, but also those campaigning for immigration reform, the Fight for $15, LGBTQ rights, and environmental justice, in a way that made clear the intersectionality of modern progressive organizing.
“We’re all dealing with the various layers of oppression,” said Jose Lopez, organizing director for Make the Road New York. “Whether it’s workplace inequality, housing inequality, or the recent decision from the Supreme Court, which to a degree sent a message to our families that we’re going to create opportunity for a limited number of children but we’re going to throw away the key to the gate to this country when we begin to talk about their parents.”
“[This convention] created the space and now we have to make sure we continue to stay in contact—using CPD as the vehicle—so that we can build out a network of power that can transform everything from immigration reform to worker rights to housing rights to the attack of black and brown people in this country by police,” Lopez said.
Groups attending the convention included New York Communities for Change, which helped launch the Fight for $15 back in 2012 and is now turning its focus toward addressing affordable housing needs in the city; Minnesota Neighborhoods Organizing for Change, which, in response to the police killing of Jamar Clark helped organize a protest occupation outside a North Minneapolis police precinct that lasted 16 days; the Texas Workers Defense Project, a worker advocacy group that has improved labor standards in the Texas construction industry; and Make the Road state chapters that have led local fights against deportations. Some of these groups have collaborated before, while others have been somewhat isolated from other community organizing groups.
Community organizations lost much of their national clout in the wake of ACORN’s demise, which was brought about in 2009 by a conservative smear campaign. CPD’s goal now—and that of the organizations represented at the conference—is to rebuild such groups’ institutional power and make it a critical part of the broader progressive movement.
In recent years, that movement has had some signal successes, which conference workshops showcased: how SEIU successfully organized for a $15 minimum wage in Seattle; how black community groups in St. Louis helped create lasting momentum for policing reform in the wake of Ferguson; how the New York Working Families Party established a powerful electoral presence; how organizers in Florida worked for climate justice in communities vulnerable to climate change.
“We are beginning to launch a real national organizing framework—that’s something that really hadn’t been seen since ACORN went under,” said Jonathan Westin, executive director of New York Communities for Change. “I think this is the beginning of an intentional path forward to try to create real structural power for community institutions and neighborhoods that already exists in places like the labor movement.”
Creating such structural power, organizers admit, will be challenging. There’s a shortage of funding for community organizations, which has kept them closely tethered to more well-funded labor unions and foundations—and, in many ways, also tethered to their funders’ agendas. The central challenge is how to establish a sustainable and independent source of funding, as unions have done with member dues, in order for community power to become a singular force on its own.
Beyond that, a critical question for community organizers is how to capitalize on both the current social and political moment.
“The genie is out the bottle with progressive politics,” Kettenring said. He believes that a strong force of community organizations can help direct the progressive movement’s current political capital in a way that avoids pitfalls of the past. “One of the historic strategic failures of the progressive movement has been its failure on race. So when you look at this convention and look at how diverse it is and how many of the organizations are rooted communities of color, you see the potentiality of how the community organizing sector can help root a more progressive, but also diverse politics.”
By Justin Miller
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4 days ago
4 days ago