Fed Up on Nightly Business Report
Nightly Business Report - November 11, 2014 ...
Nightly Business Report - November 11, 2014
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Fed's Kashkari says racial economic gap needs forceful response
A U.S. central banker on Wednesday pledged to devote more resources to addressing economic disparities between black...
A U.S. central banker on Wednesday pledged to devote more resources to addressing economic disparities between black and white Americans, saying the high rate of unemployment among African Americans is "really troubling."
"I do think some of the racial disparities are a crisis and we need to treat them like a crisis," Neel Kashkari, chief of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, said after meeting with members of the Minneapolis black community and Fed Up, a network of community organizations and labor unions calling for changes to the U.S. central bank.
Kashkari, a former Republican candidate for California governor, is the son of Indian immigrants and the only one of 17 Fed policy-makers nationwide who is not white.
Unemployment among black Americans, for example, is typically twice that for whites, Kashkari noted. Educational disparity may be one factor, but more research is needed to identify causes, he said.
"We need to understand the 'why?' before we can design potential solutions," Kashkari said. "You don’t tackle a crisis with incremental solutions ... We need to bring overwhelming force to try to address this."
At the same time, Kashkari suggested the solutions are likely to go beyond the powers of the Fed, with lawmakers and local politicians likely in a better position to craft meaningful solutions.
The Fed, he said, has only the tool of interest rates at its disposal. As long as inflation remains low, he said, the Fed can keep rates low to boost job prospects for all Americans. But, he said, there is little the Fed can do to address structural problems in the economy besides contribute to research.
Regional Fed bank presidents often meet with members of their communities but only rarely are those meetings publicized.
Wednesday's meeting and press conference afterward was livestreamed by Minneapolis-based media collective Unicorn Riot from the offices of Minnesota Neighborhoods Organizing for Change, which hosted the event at which several community members aired their experiences with low pay, long hours and homelessness.
Kashkari promised to spend a day with one of the participants to better understand the challenges she faces.
He also promised to meet with community activists again this month on the sidelines of an annual meeting of global central bankers in a national park near the well-heeled town of Jackson, Wyoming, and to collaborate on research.
"My job is to be your voice," he said.
By KRISTOFFER TIGUE
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I Love Working at Starbucks—But Conditions Have to Change
Caitlin O’Reilly-Green is a member of Rise Up Georgia, a partner of Center for Popular Democracy. Too many employees...
Caitlin O’Reilly-Green is a member of Rise Up Georgia, a partner of Center for Popular Democracy.
Too many employees have to deal with inconsistent work schedulesOver the past 18 months, I have been working as a barista at Starbucks–and I love it here. I love making coffee, and I love chatting with customers. Despite the love I have for my work, I have to speak up on behalf of my co-workers: Something has to change in the way Starbucks is treating us.
This became clear to me when I met other Starbucks workers through Rise Up Georgia, a racial and economic justice organization based in Atlanta that is a partner of Center for Popular Democracy, the union-supported group that released a report Wednesday criticizing Starbuck’s labor practices. Through talking with my co-workers, I realized that I wasn’t the only one having a hard time planning my life around my work.
I have seen many co-workers quit on short notice because they couldn’t earn enough to make ends meet or their work schedule was too erratic to plan important things like child care. Though I faced some of the same issues, the hardest part of the job for me was without a doubt the so-called “skeleton-shifts”–severely understaffed shifts that left me stressed, exhausted, and, as a result, sick.
Earlier this year, I worked four days in a row with only my shift supervisor in the back to support me. A co-worker called in sick each day, so I was alone serving the entire store. My store has a drive-through, two registers in the front and a coffee bar–and I was the only one tending all of them.
The work was so grueling that I eventually developed a muscle spasm in my back and was forced to stop working for three months in order to recover from my injury.
When I took my struggles to Starbucks, the company listened and showed me that it cared about my problems. I was offered the opportunity to transfer to a store closer to my home so that I could have a shorter commute, and I now know how to indicate my preferred availability for shifts, so that I have a better chance of planning my life outside of work.
I’m so happy that Starbucks heard me, but I’m just one person. Unfortunately many Starbucks workers don’t speak up and voice their struggles.
My co-workers silently work “clopen” shifts, where they shut down the store at night and come back the next morning to open it. They silently deal with inconsistent work schedules. They silently cope with not knowing how much work they’re going to get each week, making it impossible for them to budget—and budgeting is already hard on $8.25 an hour.
The solution should be obvious for Starbucks. Instead of relying on every worker to bravely speak up about their struggles, Starbucks should change a system that is fundamentally broken.
I’m grateful for the improvements in my schedule, but I strongly believe that all of us deserve hours we can count on. I am speaking up and writing this op-ed in the hope that Howard Schultz, the CEO, will listen to the workers of his company and see that store-level problems don’t happen because of individual managers. It’s the company-wide structure that is failing us.
I think Starbucks is a great company, and I still believe that it wants its employees to be happy. But to get there Starbucks workers need a seat at the table.
Source: Time
Fed Hawk Lacker to Retire Oct. 1, Successor Search Under Way
Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond President Jeffrey Lacker plans to retire Oct. 1, marking the exit of one of the U.S....
Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond President Jeffrey Lacker plans to retire Oct. 1, marking the exit of one of the U.S. central bank’s most steadfast inflation fighters at a time when the Fed is weighing how quickly to raise interest rates.
The Richmond Fed said Tuesday that a committee had been formed to find a successor for Lacker, who has led the regional Fed bank since 2004, and has engaged professional services firm Heidrick & Struggles to conduct the search. The head of the Richmond Fed will be a voting member of the policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee in 2018.
Lacker, 61, was a voice of restraint in the use of monetary policy and the central bank’s balance sheet as the Fed deployed extraordinary powers to combat the financial crisis, the worst recession since the Great Depression as well as a sluggish recovery.
“He was consistent in terms of wanting a narrow Fed that stuck to the business of ensuring price stability because that would be the Fed’s best contribution to society,” said Vincent Reinhart, chief economist at Standish Mellon Asset Management Co. LLC in Boston. “Jeff Lacker kept the faith.”
Lacker dissented frequently in favor of tighter policy when he was a voter on the FOMC, including at every meeting in 2012. During the financial crisis he warned about channeling credit to specific sectors of the economy, inflation risks and government rescues of troubled banks.
Core Doctrines
One of Lacker’s core doctrines was that an expansion of Fed credit to other sectors of the economy would create expectations of further support and thus further destabilize markets in the future as investors tested the perceived safety net.
“The striking feature of central bank lending during the recent turmoil is the extent to which it has extended well beyond the boundaries that previously were understood to constrain such lending,” Lacker said in a speech in November 2008.
Lacker wasn’t alone in those views. Former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker said the bailouts had taken the central bank to “the very edge of its lawful and implied powers, transcending in the process certain long-embedded central banking principles and practices.”
Arguing for constraint when the entire financial system was at risk seemed overly cautious to some of his colleagues. Former Chairman Ben S. Bernanke noted that Lacker opposed a crisis-era innovation called the Term Securities Lending Facility, where the Fed loaned out its Treasury portfolio to primary dealers in exchange for mortgage-backed securities as collateral.
“Jeff Lacker spoke against the TSLF,” Bernanke wrote in his book, “The Courage to Act.”
Lacker will depart three years ahead of his mandatory retirement age of 65. He hasn’t lined up another job, according to Richmond Fed spokeswoman Laura Fortunato. “He does want to get back to writing and research,” she said.
The search for his successor, which gets under way as the Atlanta Fed is undertaking its own campaign to replace its president Dennis Lockhart, who retires Feb. 28, will be conducted nationally to “identify a broad, diverse and highly qualified candidate pool for this leadership role,” the Richmond Fed said in a statement on its website.
The Fed is under pressure to increase diversity among its leaders after criticism that it is dominated by white men. Janet Yellen, the first woman to chair the central bank, has said she’d like to see more diversity, though the Richmond Fed’s own board of directors will make the ultimate selection.
Jordan Haedtler, campaign manager for the Fed Up coalition, which has called for a more diverse leadership that includes more minorities and women, said the group will push for “a publicly inclusive and transparent process with the consideration of diverse candidates who will consider labor market conditions for all workers in weighing their decisions.”
Haedtler said Lacker was “always gracious” and toured low-income communities in Charlotte, North Carolina, with one of their member groups.
Given the Richmond Fed’s tradition of standing firm on price stability, “my guess is that the Richmond Fed will find a hawk,” said Mark Vitner, a senior economist at Wells Fargo Securities LLC in Charlotte. “Part of this reflects the sentiment of businesses, residents and bankers located in this part of the country, who tend to take a more cautious view on what monetary policy can and cannot do,” he said.
Atlanta’s Vacancy
Lacker admitted in speeches that his forecasts for the recovery were at times too optimistic. His warnings about inflation were defused as shocks hit the economy. When the Fed decided to go forward with a second round of quantitative easing in November 2010, Lacker raised concerns that it could make it hard to restrain inflation.
“This poses unacceptable risks to price stability and to our credibility,” he said, according to the meeting transcript. “I fear today’s decision and the expectations it encourages will come back to haunt us.”
The Fed’s preferred inflation measure, the personal consumption expenditures price index, did rise above its 2 percent target in 2011 and for part of 2012. It then fell below 2 percent in May that year and has never risen above that level since, partly due to a tumble in oil prices that began in 2014.
By Craig Torres
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Watch protesters descend on 5-star resort where GOP plots against American workers
Watch protesters descend on 5-star resort where GOP plots against American workers
Scores of protesters, gathered for a march organized by the Center for Popular Democracy Action in partnership with Tax...
Scores of protesters, gathered for a march organized by the Center for Popular Democracy Action in partnership with Tax March, converged on West Virginia Thursday from ten different states.
Watch the video and read the article here.
Group Seeks All Drafts of Scaffold Law Report
Capitol Confidential - August 20, 2014, by Casey Seiler - The Center for Popular Democracy, a labor-backed advocacy...
Capitol Confidential - August 20, 2014, by Casey Seiler - The Center for Popular Democracy, a labor-backed advocacy group that supports New York’s controversial Scaffold Law, has filed an appeal of its initial Freedom of Information Law request for all communications between SUNY’s Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government and the Lawsuit Reform Alliance, the business-backed anti-Scaffold Law group that paid almost $83,000 for an analysis of the law’s economic impacts.
That report, made public in February, has been the subject of fierce debate — concerning the details of the Institute’s report as well as larger issues of academic integrity. The Rockefeller Institute subsequently backed away from the most controversial chapter of the report, which included a statistical analysis that concluded gravity-related accidents fell in Illinois after the state ditched its version of Scaffold Law.
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. 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 initial FOIL request from the Center for Popular Democracy resulted in SUNY’s release of email communications between Rockefeller Institute researchers and Tom Stebbins of the Lawsuit Reform Alliance — contact that was required by the contract for the report.
On appeal, SUNY released an initial draft copy of the report that had been attached to one of those emails. The TU last week offered a side-by-side comparison of the draft and final versions.
The Center is now requesting to see all subsequent drafts of the report. “Given that the anti-worker groups behind this debunked report are still trying to use its flawed findings to weaken New York’s safety laws, SUNY should release all of the drafts that we know exist,” said the group’s Josie Duffy. “What we saw in the one draft that SUNY did release was disturbing enough, but we still don’t have a full accounting of how this study was manipulated.”
A SUNY spokeswoman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment — though it’s unlikely the system would have anything to say about the mere filing of a FOIL request.
Here’s the Center’s FOIL appeal:
Center FOIL appeal
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Turmoil Among Progressive, Latino Groups After Julian Castro Attacked
Turmoil Among Progressive, Latino Groups After Julian Castro Attacked
Why Are Progressive Groups Slamming Julián Castro? Castro,Julian-Clinton,HillaryTexas Insider Report: WASHINGTON, D.C...
Why Are Progressive Groups Slamming Julián Castro?
Castro,Julian-Clinton,HillaryTexas Insider Report: WASHINGTON, D.C. – In the middle of April, POLITICO reported that several progressive groups have targeted HUD Secretary Julián Castro, questioning his vice presidential qualifications if Hillary Clinton were to win the Democratic presidential nomination. The fight between a new-school Latino group and some old-school Latino groups erupted into chatter that kept getting stronger, so much so that Castro had to address it with NBC News.
The new-school latinos campaign led to dissension among Latino organizations. Others have weighed in on the story, claiming that Castro being Latino is just irrelevant. In the midst of all this hubbub, one thing became clear — none of those old-guard Latino groups countered on the merits of the attack against Castro. Apparently, he is untouchable, regardless what he does.
Joe Velasquez, a former deputy political director in the Clinton Administration, submitted his resignation letter from the board of American Family Voices (AFV), which was part of the coalition of groups that hit Castro for a HUD policy the groups argue is too friendly to financial institutions looking to buy distressed homes.
berniesanders-hillaryclintonAnd, the Sanders campaign denied having any part in the effort to discredit Castro.
Progressive groups target Julián Castro
They say the record of the HUD secretary makes him unsuitable to be Clinton’s VP.
By Edward-Isaac Dovere
The 41-year-old Julian Castro is seen by many as the perfect balance to Hillary Clinton. But the veepstakes oppo war has begun.
With Bernie Sanders’ durability exciting progressives at their potential to shape the Democratic race, a coalition of groups — many of them backers of the Vermont senator — are launching a preemptive strike against Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, aimed at disqualifying him from consideration to be Hillary Clinton’s running mate.
Tuesday morning, the group emailed petitions to several million people attacking Castro on the relatively obscure issue of his handling of mortgage sales and launching a website with an unsubtle address: DontSellOurHomesToWallStreet.org.
They’re just as open with their political aims: to publicly discredit Castro as a progressive, latching onto the mortgage issue to seed enough suspicion to keep him off Clinton’s shortlist.
“It’s a situation where the Clinton campaign wants Castro to be a major asset to her chances of winning the White House, and unless he changes his position related to foreclosures and loans, he’ll be a toxic asset to the Clinton campaign,” said Matt Nelson, the managing director for Presente.org, the nation’s largest Latino organizing group that focuses on social justice.
“All year, we’ve seen the candidates tripping over themselves to show how tough they’ll be on Wall Street,” said Kurt Walters, the campaign manager for Root Strikers, a 501(c4) group of Demand Progress and its 2 million affiliated activists, who is planning to deliver the petitions to Castro’s office when they’re ready. “Then to turn around and take a step backwards on that exact question, and Castro, Julian3hput someone who has been doing the exact opposite — I think it would be tough for a lot of people who care about Wall Street accountability to get excited about that pick.”
By the coalition’s calculations, HUD under Castro has sold 98 percent of the long-delinquent mortgages it acquired through a program aimed at preventing foreclosures to Wall Street banks under Castro’s watch, without anywhere near the number of needed strings attached. (HUD says that figure is way off.) And Nelson and Walters say that for a politician who’s aiming to be considered the vice presidential prospect for both progressives and minorities, Castro has done too much to help private equity firms like Blackstone, instead of black and Latino communities.
“If Secretary Castro fails to create significant momentum in terms of stopping the sale of mortgages to Wall Street, then I do think it disqualifies him. But there’s time left on the clock,” said Jonathan Westin, the director of New York Communities for Change, which was formed out of the remains of the community activist group ACORN. “I think a lot of the progressive movement would not be in support of a Castro ticket if he fails to make traction here.”
The 41-year-old Castro is seen by many as the perfect balance to Clinton — younger and Latino, with a history as mayor of San Antonio and now two years in the Obama administration, handsome and with a 2012 convention keynote speech that immediately made him a rising star to watch in the party. And people close to him say he’s a proven progressive across the board.
“Castro has a strong record at HUD fighting on behalf of progressive issues including protecting those with criminal records, standing up for LGBT rights and advocating for more inclusive communities through affirmatively furthering fair housing,” said one person close to the secretary.
But Maurice Weeks, an Atlanta-based organizer who works on housing justice in communities of color for the Center for Popular Democracy/CPD Action, said that Castro’s lack of action at HUD is breeding more gentrification and suffering in a way that should make blacks and Latinos pay attention.
“What I wouldn’t be excited about is any candidate, not just Julián, who is looking to further some of these practices,” Weeks said.
At issue is the Distressed Asset Stabilization Program, started in 2010 to allow mortgages going toward foreclosure to be sold to what HUD calls “qualified bidders and encourages them to work with borrowers to help bring the loan out of default.”
The progressives attacking Castro say they believe the mortgages should be sold instead to nonprofits and other institutions that would care more about the communities involved. What Castro’s done, they say, has essentially amounted to a fire sale for Wall Street firms.
Castro,Julian3hRep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and one of Sanders’ few endorsers in Congress, complained about the program to Castro last week in a letter obtained by Politico.
“Your own Distressed Asset Stabilization Program, which was designed to help right the wrongs of the meltdown years, has been selling homes that once belonged to the families I’ve spoken with at rock-bottom prices to the Wall Street entities that created this situation in the first place,” Grijalva wrote.
HUD says that Castro has continued to meet with advocates, in the hopes of improving the policy, and points to several changes that have been made — including those that have increased the number of mortgages sold to nonprofits. An official pointed to changes made a year ago that, among other things, now require servicers buying loans to delay foreclosure for a year.
“Providing an option for homeowners to remain in their homes is one of the reasons the DASP program was created” said a HUD spokesperson. “We’ve received feedback from stakeholders which has led us to make a number of important changes to the program including the creation of nonprofit-only pools and delaying foreclosure for a year. Additionally, we are still evaluating further enhancements to the program to meet our core mission.”
But that’s not enough for the groups joining the coalition to attack Castro. Those include the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) Action, American Family Voices, Color of Change, Courage Campaign, CPD Action, Daily Kos, MoveOn, New York Communities for Change, Other 98%, Presente, RootsAction, Rootstrikers and the Working Families Party.
With the exception of the Working Families Party, which is backing Sanders, the groups have not formally endorsed a candidate in the presidential primaries.
Most conversations about Clinton’s prospective pick center on Castro and Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), and the secretary’s ambitions to be the vice presidential nominee are well known.
But among progressives, so are the suspicions about his bona fides. The red banner across the website proclaiming “TELL HUD SECRETARY JULIAN CASTRO: STOP SELLING OUR NEIGHBORHOODS TO WALL STREET!” amounts to the opening salvo in doing something about it.
“There’s a lot of hope around him,” said Brandi Collins, campaign director for the 1.2-million member Color of Change, who said she was one of the people excited by the possibilities opened up by his keynote speech.
Collins said this complaint about Castro’s leadership is reflective of a whole range of issues her organization has had with what members say is the secretary’s closeness to Wall Street and lack of attention to black and brown communities.
“If he’s not showing up for our communities while the cameras aren’t there, we don’t know that he’ll show up when he’s on his way to the White House,” Collins said.
According to Julia Gordon, formerly at the Center for American Progress and currently an executive vice president at the National Community Stabilization Trust, the coalition may have a point — if only because it is taking advantage of opaque accounting at HUD. Gordon said she’s met often with HUD about these issues but hasn’t seen the kind of progress she’d like or evidence that the program matches the claims that officials make.
“We know it’s been good for investors. According to HUD, it’s been good for the fund, although the level of detail that they release to account for it is minimal. We really don’t know how good it’s been for the homeowners, and that’s where this wave of protests is coming from,” Gordon said.
Laurie Goodman, the director of the Housing Finance Policy Center at the Urban Institute, said that the people who are attacking Castro for selling the loans to Wall Street are misinterpreting the pragmatic realities about what’s in play.
The mortgages in question tend to be delinquent for over two years, she said, and getting them out of HUD with its limited resources and tools to deal with them is a positive step for homeowners. Only big banks can take on mortgages like that, she argued, making the nonprofit issue moot.
“The only way to help these borrowers is to sell the loans. You don’t have any other buyers big enough in size,” she said. “Even if you wanted to do something different, you couldn’t.”
Within that, though, Goodman credited HUD under Castro for making “some really big improvements.”
Not nearly enough, according to Gordon.
“Both HUD and [the Federal Housing Finance Agency] have let down communities by not focusing on what they want the buyer to do with these,” Gordon said, arguing that they’ve been focused instead on offloading the debt. “They’re just like, ‘Get it away from me.’”
The idea that Castro would be the first Latino on a national ticket means something, Nelson said, though he argued that this only adds to the burden for the secretary to show leadership on the mortgage issue in the way progressives want at this moment of added attention to their concerns.
Nelson said that at Presente, they think of it like a parable — it doesn’t make it any better to be hurt if the hurt is coming from one of their own.
There are two trees in a forest, Nelson said, and they see an ax coming to chop them down. “Don’t worry,” says one tree to the other, “the handle’s one of us.”
“Basically,” Nelson said, “we’re fighting to make sure Castro isn’t the handle.”
By Edward-Isaac Dovere
Source
Behind the Business Attire, Many Bank Workers Earn Poverty Wages
The Committee for Better Banks (CBB), a Communications Workers of America (CWA)-affiliated community and labor...
The Committee for Better Banks (CBB), a Communications Workers of America (CWA)-affiliated community and labor coalition, was created in 2013 to put an end to that. Cassaundra Plummer, a Maryland-based CBB member currently employed as a bank teller at TD Bank, told In These Times, “A lot of the issues within the banks are not discussed, they’re kept really quiet. As a young woman, I always thought that working at a bank was more of a prestigious job than retail. Once I actually got into banking, I realized that it’s not a whole lot different.”
The CBB, which has grown from eight lead members in April to approximately 60 in six different states today, with thousands more either engaged through petition signing or attending rallies. CBB is hoping to expand and create a critical mass of organized workers by bringing these issues out in the open.
A study released by the National Employment Law Project (NELP) early this month shored up CBB claims, finding that 30.4% of the 1.7 million retail banking employees across the country—more than 500,000 workers—are paid less than $15 an hour. Nearly three-quarters of low-wage bank workers are bank tellers, 84.3% of which are women.
Another report, published by the UC Berkeley Labor Center last year, found that these low-wages led 31% of bank teller families toward enrolling in public assistance programs (compared to 25 percent of the entire workforce). “The cost of public benefits to families of bank tellers is nearly $900 million per year,” says the report.
Though it was labeled an “occupational winner” by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for its 84% throughout its growth in the 1970s, the introduction and proliferation of automated teller machines helped put the brakes on that, leading to a projected 1% growth over the next decade. As Timothy Noah noted for Slate in 2010, banks tellers earn “slightly less than [they] did in 1970,” putting the job at the center of wage stagnation that has become common-place throughout the middle class, especially within the context of expectations of higher productivity.
CEO compensation and executive pay indeed remain at worrying heights. The NELP report found that CEOs of Wells Fargo and Bank of America made amounts equal to more than 500 times the annual earnings of an average bank teller. Stephen Lerner, the architect of SEIU’s famed Justice for Janitors campaign, summed up the wealth disparity among bankers at the top and bottom of the pay brackets in a 2010 New Labor Forum article, writing, “We could increase pay by $2.00 per hour and provide employer-paid health insurance for over 550,000 tellers with just 3.6 percent of the bonuses paid out to executives.”
“The constant focus on making more forces the people working in the bank to take on more work, but we’re being paid the same amount,” says Plummer. “We’re not expecting to become wealthy off of entry-level positions. But the corporations make a lot of money off of the things that we do—the sales goals, and all that we have to do to create wealth for the bank. It should be reciprocated back to the employees.”
By shifting traditional banking services toward automation, low-wage bank workers such as bank tellers and personal bankers have also become the frontline for pushing financial products on to customers in an effort to increase profits. The pressure of sales quotas imposed by management and executives at the top keeps low-wage bank workers under more scrutiny than ever before. Customer service employees in retail banks must not only attempt to hook patrons onto core retail banking services like checking and savings accounts, but must also resort to hawking mortgages and credit cards in ways CBB organizers say can be predatory. Tellers risk termination if they fail to meet quotas for such products.
“Wells Fargo creates an environment of hostility and humiliation. Multiple times I witnessed management behaving in a condescending fashion to those who did not meet ‘goals’ even though their customer service was excellent. Wells no longer cares about customer service or the best interest of their customers; they are only looking to push products and most of the time they are unnecessary products,” one bank employee told the Committee of Better Banks when they surveyed 5,000 workers for the aforementioned study at the group’s conception.
According an April 2015 report by the Center for Popular Democracy, since 2011, 17 different lawsuits across the top five banks in the country (JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and US Bank) have been settled for nearly $46 billion, “highlighting a range of alleged illegal and unethical business practices.”
A 2013 Los Angeles Times investigation reported that the pressure of sales goals, which increase U.S retail banks’ profits, has led some bank workers to commit fraud, forging signatures, opening secret checking accounts with fees attached, or even credit lines for customers in order to keep up with their sales goals. This has led to lawsuits from customers and even cities decrying the rigid and unfair sales culture fostered by the banking industry. When these practices become public, banks fire employees and managers in alleged attempts to uphold ethical finance.
But as Khalid Taha, one of the first Committee members in California, currently employed at Wells Fargo in San Diego, describes it, the “impossible” sales goals come from the top and workers ultimately have no other option. “They fire the entry level employees which is us, but if you think about it, yes we are responsible for it, but we are also victims,” says Taha. “We have to keep our jobs, pay our rent. We have no way but to go a little bit shady when we deal with our customers because the company wants to meet their quota. They don’t care how.”
Beyond low pay, CBB has been working to connect these pressurized work environments to their detrimental effects on the economy caused by the bank’s business practices.
The top four retail banks in the country (JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo), part of the too-big-to-fail banking institutions that some, like presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, have called to be broken up, now collectively possess assets equivalent to 45% of the U.S economy, a slight increase than what it was in 2008 before that year’s financial crisis.
Lerner, who is currently advising CBB as a fellow at the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University, told In These Times, “This campaign is different from many union campaigns that say ‘our sole goal is winning better conditions for workers.’ Those campaigns are important, [but] in this case we’re saying that you can’t win better conditions for workers unless you reform the industry—and you can’t reform the industry unless workers are helping reform it.”
At an April 2015 rally in Minnesota where they delivered 11,000 signatures on a petition calling for an end to sales goals, the Committee for Better Banks released a proposed bill of rights for bank workers. One of the planks of the bill addresses what they say is community suffering at the hands of banks: “We must eliminate unreasonable sales goals or performance metrics that force us to push unnecessary products on our customers. We are here for our neighbors—for the child who opens his first savings account, for the newlywed couple planning ahead to retirement, for the senior citizen opening a credit card. We want to be honest brokers of your financial security, and that means an end to pressure tactics that only serve to line shareholders’ pockets.”
“We’re at the very beginning of a baby-steps campaign to build working support for the idea that we need to do two things, and that come simultaneously: We need to address how bank workers unfairly—low pay, etc., but we need to connect with how the finance industry behaves is bad for the overall economy,” Lerner says.
In 2010, Lerner was launching SEIU’s new plan to organize bank workers. Mike Elk described that effort as emanating from his realization that banks influenced the rest of labor organizing through its close connections to the pensions and investment banks that intertwined with financial decisions made not only by workers but their communities, as well.
At the time, fellow journalist Steve Early told Elk, “[Successful organizing] require[s] a long-term commitment that few unions are willing to make, even when dealing with a strategic multinational target that’s not going away.” Lerner left SEIU later that year under disputed circumstances, and his work organizing bank employees was abandoned by the union.
CEO and President of union-owned Amalgamated Bank, Keith Mestrich announced in early August that the bank’s employees would be making at least $15 an hour under their new collective bargaining agreement. He told Buzzfeed, “We think it’s the right thing for our bank to do, and frankly we think it’s the right thing for all banks to do. … If any industry in this country can afford to set a new minimum for its workers, it’s the banking industry.”
But in the rest of the nonunionized retail banking industry, CBB, like the Fight for 15 and OUR Walmart, will be agitating for improvements.
“It was a little bit scary at the beginning, but we have to do it. If we don’t talk then the banks will do whatever they want to do,” says Taha.
Source: In These Times
Hillary Clinton lays out sweeping voting fights vision
In a major speech on voting rights Thursday, Hillary Clinton ...
In a major speech on voting rights Thursday, Hillary Clinton laid out a far-reaching vision for expanding access to the ballot box, and denounced Republican efforts to make voting harder.
Speaking at Texas Southern University in Houston, Clinton called for every American to be automatically registered to vote when they turn 18 unless they choose not to be. She backed a nationwide standard of at least 20 days of early voting. She urged Congress to pass legislation strengthening the Voting Rights Act, which was gravely weakened by a 2013 Supreme Court ruling. And she slammed restrictive voting laws imposed by the GOP in Texas, North Carolina, Ohio, and Wisconsin, which she said affect minorities and students in particular.
“We have a responsibility to say clearly and directly what’s really going on in our country,” Clinton said, “because what is happening is a sweeping effort to dis-empower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people, and young people from one end of our country to the other.”
“We should be clearing the way for more people to vote, not putting up every road-block anyone can imagine,” Clinton added.
From a political perspective, forthrightly calling out Republican voting restrictions and advocating greater access to voting will likely help Clinton shore up key sections of her base – minorities and students in particular. And it could put the GOP on notice that further efforts to make voting harder may backfire by giving Democrats a tool to motivate their supporters.
Clinton, the prohibitive front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, called out by name several of her potential 2016 rivals – Rick Perry, Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, and Chris Christie – for supporting restrictive voting policies. She said Republicans should stop “fearmongering about a phantom epidemic of voter fraud.”
“Finally, a presidential candidate is acknowledging the rampant voting discrimination that has surged since the Voting Rights Act was gutted in 2013,” Wade Henderson, CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, told msnbc. “Voting is a cornerstone of our nation’s commitment to democracy, and Clinton’s acknowledgment of its importance is noteworthy.”
Clinton said relatively little about the most hot-button voting issue, voter ID – an approach that also appears politically savvy. Despite evidence that as many as 10% of eligible voters, disproportionately minorities, don’t have the ID required by strict versions of the law, polls show voter ID is generally popular.
Instead, Clinton sought to move the voting rights debate for 2016 toward more advantageous terrain for Democrats and voting rights supporters: expanding access to voting and voter registration, to make it easier to cast a ballot and bring more Americans into the process.
Noting that between one quarter and one third of all Americans aren’t registered to vote, Clinton called for an across-the-board modernization of the registration process. The centerpiece: universal automatic voter registration, in which every citizen is automatically registered when they turn 18 unless they affirmatively choose not to be, effectively changing the system’s default status from non-registered to registered. Oregon passed such a law earlier this year, and several other states, including California, are considering the idea.
“I think this would have a profound impact on our elections and our democracy,” Clinton said.
Clinton also said registration should be updated automatically when a voter moves, and called for making voter rolls more accurate secure. And she said Republican efforts to restrict voter registration, seen in Texas, Florida, and other states, disproportionately affect marginalized communities, and students.
Around 50 million eligible voters aren’t registered, according to a recent study by the Center for Popular Democracy, based on Census Bureau data. That’s three times as many as the number who are registered but stay home.
Clinton said the nationwide early voting standard of at least 20 days should also include evening and weekend voting, to accommodate those with work or family commitments.
“If families coming out of church on Sunday are inspired to go vote, they should be free to do just that,” Clinton said, in a reference to the Souls to the Polls drives that are popular in Africa-American communities, in which people vote en masse after church.
Wisconsin, Ohio, and North Carolina — all Republican-controlled states — have cut their early voting periods in recent years, with the latter two states also eliminating same-day voter registration. And a third of all states offer no early voting at all. Democratic efforts to create or expand early voting have been killed, or allowed to languish in committee, by Republicans in at least 15 states, eight of them in the south, according to a tally compiled by the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee.
In addition, Clinton called for Congress to fully implement the recommendations of a bipartisan presidential panel on voting released last year, which included online voter registration and establishing the principle that voters shouldn’t wait more than 30 minutes. And she suggested that laws barring ex-felons from voting should be liberalized, adding her voice to a growing push against felon disenfranchisement laws.
And Clinton lamented the Supreme Court’s weakening of the Voting Rights Act.
“We need a Supreme Court that cares more about protecting the right to vote of a person to vote than the right of a corporation to buy an election,” she said.
Asked by msnbc on a call with reporters whether it was realistic to propose legislation, given the record of the Republican-controlled Congress, a senior official with the Clinton campaign pointed to ”encouraging signs” in the states, arguing that such changes could be implemented at the state level with federal support.
On voter ID, Clinton’s criticism of Texas’s law was centered on a provision that allows concealed gun permits but not student IDs, suggesting partisan bias. She didn’t offer the kind of broader condemnation of ID laws per se often voiced by voting and civil rights groups. And in criticizing Wisconsin and North Carolina’s slew of voting restrictions, she focused on cuts to early voting rather than those states’ ID laws.
Hours before Clinton spoke, a de facto arm of her campaign that provides pro-Clinton information to the media sent out an email documenting the GOP 2016 hopefuls’ records of supporting restrictive voting policies, which it contrasted with Clinton’s expansive approach.
Clinton’s speech comes less than a week after her campaign’s top lawyer, Marc Elias, filed suit to challenge Wisconsin’s voting restrictions. Last month, Elias filed a similar lawsuit challenging Ohio’s early voting cuts.
Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted called the lawsuit “frivolous” in a statement to msnbc and said Elias is wasting Ohioans’ tax dollars. “Hillary Clinton is calling for a national standard for early voting that is less than what Ohio currently offers,” Husted said. “Given this fact, I call on her to tell her attorneys to drop her elections lawsuit against Ohio.”
The Clinton campaign has said it’s not officially involved in the lawsuits but supports them.
In choosing to give the speech in Texas, Clinton was going into the belly of the beast. In addition to the ID law, which has been struck down as racially discriminatory and is currently being appealed, Texas also has the strictest voter registration rules in the country. And last week, a voting group alleged that the state is systematically failing to process registration applications, msnbc reported.
Clinton has long had a strong record on voting issues. As a volunteer for the 1972 George McGovern presidential campaign, Clinton worked to register Latino voters in Texas. And in 2005 as a senator, she introduced an expansive voting bill that would have made Election Day a national holiday and set standards for early voting.
At Texas Southern, Clinton received the Barbara Jordan Leadership Award, named for the crusading civil rights leader who was the first southern black woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.
Source: MSNBC
Watch the video for Death Cab For Cutie's new anti-Donald Trump song Read more at http://www.nme.com/news/death-cab-for-cutie/97016#EkDo9zizovyxV1uy.99
Watch the video for Death Cab For Cutie's new anti-Donald Trump song Read more at http://www.nme.com/news/death-cab-for-cutie/97016#EkDo9zizovyxV1uy.99
Death Cab For Cutie have released a new anti-Donald Trump song. The track, 'Million Dollar Loan', is one of...
Death Cab For Cutie have released a new anti-Donald Trump song.
The track, 'Million Dollar Loan', is one of 30 tracks being released over the next 30 days in the final run in to the US Presidential election. Watch the video below.
Other artists who will feature on the anti-Trump '30 Days, 30 Songs' compilation, include My Morning Jacket’s Jim James, Aimee Mann and Thao Nguyen. A previously unreleased live track by R.E.M will also feature.
"Lyrically, 'Million Dollar Loan' deals with a particularly tone deaf moment in Donald Trump's ascent to the Republican nomination,” said Death Cab For Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard. "While campaigning in New Hampshire last year, he attempted to cast himself as a self-made man by claiming he built his fortune with just a 'small loan of a million dollars' from his father. Not only has this statement been proven to be wildly untrue, he was so flippant about it. It truly disgusted me.
“Donald Trump has repeatedly demonstrated that he is unworthy of the honour and responsibility of being President of the United States of America, and in no way, shape or form represents what this country truly stands for. He is beneath us."
You can purchase 'Million Dollar Loan' here. All of 30 Days’ proceeds will go to the Center for Popular Democracy and their efforts toward Universal Voter Registration in America.
Earlier today (October 10), the music world reacted to the second US Presidential town hall debate with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
By DAMIAN JONES
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