How to Build the Movement for Progressive Power, the Urban Way
As the gears of federal government have ground to a halt, a new energy has been rocking the foundations of our urban...
As the gears of federal government have ground to a halt, a new energy has been rocking the foundations of our urban centers. From Atlanta to Seattle and points in between, cities have begun seizing the initiative, transforming themselves into laboratories for progressive change. Cities Rising is The Nation’s chronicle of those urban experiments.
Cities are where the action is these days. Progressive action, political action. From paid sick days to universal pre-K, fossil-fuel divestment to anti-fracking ordinances, police reform to immigrant rights, the country’s urban centers are leading the way, far outpacing the federal government in vision and action. Just look at the growing movement for a $15 minimum wage. While Bernie Sanders has been raising minimum-wage consciousness on the campaign trail—introducing a bill in July to raise the federal minimum to $15 and calling for the same during the first Democratic presidential debate—it was local politicians, with names barely known beyond their districts, who first heeded the call of struggling workers and made $15 a reality. Before Bernie, in other words, there was Nick Licata and Kshama Sawant, Ruth Atkins, and the Emeryville City Council.
In recognition of this moment, progressive politicians from cities around the country—Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Denver, Philadelphia, and beyond—have joined forces to begin sharing their strategies for creative progressive change. Calling themselves Local Progress, they swap policy solutions to urgent, ongoing injustices like income inequality and police brutality, share model legislation and provide strategic support for legislative campaigns. Kind of like an urban anti-ALEC. Today, just three years after it was formed, more than 400 elected officials from 40 states are part of the effort. And the victories are beginning to add up—from paid parental leave in Boston to paid sick leave in New York City, socially responsible investing in Seattle to the use of eminent domain in Richmond, California, to slash homeowner debt.
This week, Local Progress members from all over the country are meeting in Los Angeles for the group’s fourth national gathering. From October 26 through 28, they aretrading their best ideas and strategies for building progressive local power—and combatting police violence, spreading the Fight for $15, expanding affordable housing, boosting civic engagement, and pushing the fight for LGBTQ rights beyond marriage equality.
Chuy Garcia, who gave Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel a run for his millions in this year’s election, will be on the scene, as will Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges, SEIU President Mary Kay Henry, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Tefere Gebre, and dozens of council members, alderman, and supervisors from around the country. If cities are the incubators of promising progressive ideas, this gathering is a bit like the annual science expo.
The Nation has asked four Local Progress stalwarts to share some of the policy solutions they’ll be discussing at the gathering. New York City Council members Brad Lander and Antonio Reynoso, San Francisco Supervisor John Avalos, and Chicago Alderman Scott Waguespack all weighed in, offering thoughts on everything from humanizing the sharing economy to organizing for police reform, protecting sanctuary cities, and pushing back against privatization and regressive tax policy. Here’s what they said.
—Lizzy Ratner
PROTECTING WORKERS IN THE ON-DEMAND ECONOMY
By Brad Lander
Rides from Uber. Home cleaning from Handy. Meals from Seamless. Web design from Upwork. Even doctors from Medicast.
There’s no doubt the on-demand economy is convenient. Consumers can arrange for services at the tap of a touchscreen. Workers can choose their hours and earn a little extra cash.
But there’s a very dark side to the “sharing” economy: The benefits aren’t usually shared with the workers.
Working “by-the-gig” rarely provides job security, health insurance, paid sick days or family leave, on-the-job training, or retirement contributions. Workers lack the right to organize a union. And eight in 10 freelance workers report having been cheated out of wages they were owed.
President Obama and Democratic presidential candidates are finally talking about the issue. But the Republican Congress will likely block any progress. Marco Rubio recently called for even further deregulation, leaving workers at the mercy of multibillion-dollar corporations.
So cities are taking the lead in writing new rules, working with Local Progress, the National Employment Law Project, forward-thinking unions, and worker organizations to level the on-demand playing field.
In Seattle, City Council member Mike O’Brien is fighting for a bill that would allow drivers for Uber, Lyft, and other “ridesharing” companies to organize and bargain collectively so that workers have some voice in the terms and conditions of their work.
In New York City, we are working with the Freelancers Union to combat wage theft and late payment. When conventional employees are cheated out of wages, the state labor department can enforce and win double damages. The #FreelanceIsntFree campaign (which recently brought its message to the White House) would provide freelancers with similar protection.
Council Member Corey Johnson and I are working with the New York City Taxi Workers Alliance to mandate a “driver benefits fund” (funded by a small fare surcharge) to provide for-hire drivers with healthcare benefits—a first step toward the “Shared Security Account” that Nick Hanauer and David Rolf called for in a Democracy Journal article this summer. And we’re amending New York City’s human-rights laws to make clear they apply to independent workers. There is no reason Uber should be able to discriminate against drivers based on race or religion.
Meanwhile, from San Francisco to Burlington, cities are establishing offices of labor standards and adopting other innovative approaches (like partnering with community-based organizations) to enforce the laws that protect workers. One task: making sure conventional employees aren’t illegally misclassified as independent workers by employers trying to cheat them out of benefits and protections (a big problem for day laborers and domestic workers). These offices can also make sure that companies who need licenses from the city get and keep them only if they respect local, state, and federal laws.
Ultimately, we’ll need national regulation to match the growing on-demand economy. But for now, progressive cities are bringing worker protections into the 21st century—and some real sharing into the sharing economy.
THE MUNICIPAL BATTLE FOR EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW
By Antonio Reynoso
Eric Garner. Michael Brown. Tamir Rice. Sandra Bland. For more than a year, the senseless deaths of young black men and women by police officers or in police custody have dominated headlines and helped fuel a movement. Under the banner of Black Lives Matter, this movement has been gaining ground in cities, towns, and counties across the country, spreading the call to end racist policing and begin enacting serious police reform. Its powerful message has reached all the way to the presidential campaign trail and beyond. But as the public waits for progress at the national level, change is already happening at the local level, thanks to powerful alliances between community activists and hundreds of local politicians.
In New York City, where I am a City Council member representingneighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens, there is a desperate need for sensible reforms of the New York City Police Department (NYPD). For all to many New Yorkers, the excessive use of police force is a daily reality. The excessive surveillance of the Muslim community and a racialized stop-and-frisk policy also take their toll.
In response, organizations and progressive politicians have been fighting to improve accountability and transparency after years of racial profiling by the NYPD. The work has been supported by a broad coalition called Communities United for Police Reform, which has driven a strategic, multi-year campaign to knock on doors, organize the public, influence the public discourse, and pass legislation to implement smart reforms.
Communities want change, and they want to participate in the process of reforming the NYPD. So, working together, we’ve introduced the Right To Know Act as a way to meet their demands. These bills would require NYPD officers not only to identify themselves when stopping civilians but also to explain that the searches are voluntary and may be declined.
This is not the first time we have stood up for the people of our community. In 2013 and 2014, in partnership with Communities United for Police Reform, the City Council passed a series of bills known as the Community Safety Act, which together banned racial profiling by police and made it easier for New Yorkers who have experienced profiling to sue NYPD officers. The act also installed an independent inspector general to oversee the actions of the NYPD.
Of course, New York City is not the only city in our nation where racial profiling, unjust searches, and incidences of police brutality are common occurrences. Nor is it the only city where coalitions of community leaders and elected officials are working to improve the system. In the last year alone, communities have joined together with progressive local legislators to correct the imbalance of justice.
In Los Angeles County, the grassroots organization Dignity and Power Nowwon a transformative campaign, led by formerly incarcerated people and their families, to establish a strong civilian oversight commission for the sheriff’s department, which has an ugly history of violence against civilians on the streets and in county jails.
In Newark, community leaders partnered with Mayor Ras Baraka to create one of strongest civilian complaint review boards in the country, which has both a voice in disciplining police officers and a policy advisory role.
And in Minneapolis, a coalition led by Neighborhoods Organizing for Change succeeded in pressing the City Council to repeal spitting and loitering ordinances that were being disproportionately used to harass and harm black and Latino residents. They also won passage of a data-collection law that will begin to collect and publicize important evidence about the police department’s stop-and-frisk and use-of-force practices.
Members of Local Progress, partnering with community-based allies, have been central to these fights and many more, and we will continue combating such injustices across the United States, fighting for everyone to be treated equally under the law.
CITIES MUST LEAD THE NATION ON IMMIGRANT JUSTICE
By John Avalos
In the last few years, hundreds of cities across America have disentangled their police departments and jails from the federal immigrant-deportation machine, refusing to honor the Feds’ requests that cities detain immigrants past their release date so they could be picked up and deported. These policies protect immigrant families from the devastation of deportation and from crime, because they foster better relationships between the police and immigrant communities. The movement has been a bright spot for our country’s immigrant-rights movement.
But during the last few months, the policies, and in some cases the very idea, of sanctuary cities has come under attack. The catalyst for these changes was an undocumented immigrant named Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez who allegedly shot and killed a young white woman named Kate Steinle. He claims that the shooting was an accident, but her case has become a cause célèbre among opponents of immigrants because Lopez-Sanchez had been deported five times previously, and had recently been released from jail in San Francisco without being turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
San Francisco’s Due Process for All Ordinance, the latest update to its Sanctuary City policy, bars the sheriff from detaining people past their release date on behalf of ICE’s Secure Communities, or S-Comm, program. The goal of Due Process for All is to protect immigrants and their families from S-Comm, which created an immigration dragnet, deporting tens of thousands of immigrants and tearing their families apart. Due Process for All also enables immigrants to be integrated into San Francisco’s local law-enforcement efforts by promoting relationships between immigrant communities and the police. San Francisco has been at the leading edge of a national movement: across the nation, over 350 other local governments have recently adopted policies limiting collaboration with federal immigration officials.
But as a result of the widespread effort of local governments to limit coordination with the S-Comm, the federal government has tweaked and renamed its deportation effort the Priority Enforcement Program (PEP), which calls on local law enforcement to notify Homeland Security of a detainee’s release rather than detaining the individual past his or her release date. Like S-Comm, PEP has the same effect of weakening trust between immigrants and local law enforcement because local law enforcement is seen as an arm of federal immigration efforts.
The politics of race, citizen entitlement, and immigration reform have put San Francisco and other cities’ sanctuary-city policies squarely in the cross hairs of conservative extremists and political opportunists. From the highly polarizing presidential campaign of Donald Trump to the calculated posturing of Hillary Clinton (who supports PEP) to the election-year pandering of San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, eager to blame the policy for Steinle’s death, politicians are scapegoating immigrants and undermining the sanctuary city policies that immigrants rely on for their security. Just last week, the US Senate narrowly failed to pass a Republican-backed bill that threatened to withhold federal grants from sanctuary cities and increase penalties for undocumented immigrants who reenter the United States after deportation.
Some cities are already working to resist this pressure. On the same day that Senate Republicans sought to punish sanctuary cities, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a resolution reaffirming our commitment to the Due Process for All Ordinance and urging our sheriff not to comply with the new PEP program.
Cities around the country should follow suit and adopt a wide array of programs and policies to protect and empower immigrant communities. Like New Haven, they can establish Municipal ID cards to help immigrants navigate daily life; like Chicago, they can ensure that city services are available in multiple languages; like New York, they can provide quality free legal counsel to residents facing deportation; and like Los Angeles, they can conduct outreach programs and offer affordable citizenship preparation courses to help residents naturalize and gain the benefits of citizenship.
This moment is a pivotal one for our nation and the many cities that have sought to protect immigrants against deportation. We either succumb to the rightward push of the politics of race and citizen entitlement or we strengthen our efforts to protect and integrate immigrants and their families in recognition and honor of the contributions they make to our society. Local governments must lead our nation forward.
FIGHT FOR A PROGRESSIVE SOURCE OF REVENUE IN CHICAGO
By Scott Waguespack
The fiscal crisis that’s squeezing cities and towns across this country is perhaps at its most dramatic in Chicago.
Our municipal pension systems are woefully underfunded, the result of decades of failure by city and state governments to pay their share. Our schools are facing an enormous fiscal shortfall that could result in the firing of 5,000 teachers in the middle of the year. And we’re witnessing heartbreaking violence in our communities, the result of an overwhelmed police force and neighborhoods mired in economic hardship.
Simply put, our city has a cash problem.
To his credit, Mayor Rahm Emanuel acknowledged this problem in his recent budget address, railing against the budgeting tricks of previous years and vowing to end the city’s structural deficit. Unfortunately, Mayor Emanuel reached into the same tired bag of tricks in order to solve the problem: regressive tax increases on working families and privatization of public services.
These are tricks we’re all too familiar with here in Chicago. We’ve already been through some of the worst privatization deals in the country, and we know full well from our experiences with parking meters and school janitors that it’s been a fiscal boondoggle resulting in higher costs and worse services for taxpayers. And the mayor’s regressive property-tax proposal is just another way to balance budgets by raising taxes on working families who are already struggling to get by.
Here’s the good news, though: Chicago is one of the wealthiest cities on the planet. There’s an enormous amount of capital flowing through this city every day. Chicago’s City Council Progressive Caucus, which I chair, has been advocating for common-sense tax ideas to direct some of these dollars toward crucial programs and services, easing the burden on working families without selling off public assets.
We’ve advocated for creating a special property-taxing district that covers the skyscrapers in downtown Chicago. Too often, owners of these buildings hire politically connected firms to get enormous discounts on their assessments; a more fair valuation would generate substantial new revenue.
We support reforming the billion-dollar mayoral slush fund called “tax-increment financing.” We support fixing the problems in the infamous parking-meter privatization deal. We introduced an amendment that would tax big-box stores for the undue stress they put on our stormwater system, and have called for expanding the sales tax to include luxury services like pet grooming or portfolio management.
In short, the Progressive Caucus has progressive revenue ideas that will work for all of Chicago. We’ve convened a series of town hall meetings across the city, drawing crowds of hundreds of concerned neighbors, and have introduced a series of amendments to move this budget in the right direction.
As progressive leaders who love this city, our caucus knows we need new revenue to educate our children, care for those in need, and provide growth and opportunity in every community. For our city to prosper, those dollars must come from those who can most afford to pay, not from the pockets of working families.
Flexible Schedules vs. Workers’ Burdened Life
Michael Saltsman’s “A Stiff Jab at Flexible Work Schedules” (op-ed, March 30) misses the mark. Policy makers don’t want...
Michael Saltsman’s “A Stiff Jab at Flexible Work Schedules” (op-ed, March 30) misses the mark. Policy makers don’t want to “dictate how businesses schedule employees’ work”—but rather ensure employees no longer have every hour of their lives dictated by increasingly unpredictable schedules.
Today, most Americans are not working nine to five. Instead, they’re in hourly jobs that demand they be constantly available for ever-changing schedules, and require working moms, students and others to regularly cancel child care, classes and other commitments. Researchers at the University of Chicago have shown us just how little flexibility workers have, finding that fully 41% of early career hourly workers receive their schedules less than a week in advance, and half have no say in their schedule. Working should not be this hard—and until recently, it wasn’t.
Ideally, businesses would make changes on their own. When a spotlight is aimed at them, they do. In the past year, major retailers including Gap and J. Crew ended on-call shifts after an inquiry from the New York attorney general and, under continued pressure from workers, Starbucks continues to strive to deliver scheduling reforms it has promised. Forward-thinking employers are starting to recognize that scheduling improvements are good for business, reducing turnover and improving productivity.
Even so, public policy is needed to set a baseline standard that all businesses can follow and that level the playing field across the economy. It is about simply catching up with a changing workforce.
By Carrie Gleason
Source
Warren met privately with 'Draft Warren' supporters
Elizabeth Warren says she has no intention of jumping into the 2016 race, but she recently met behind closed doors with...
Elizabeth Warren says she has no intention of jumping into the 2016 race, but she recently met behind closed doors with members of a movement that’s urging her to run.
The Massachusetts senator held a private meeting April 22 with a small group of progressive leaders from across the country — including some vocal “Run Warren Run” supporters who continue to hold out hope that she’ll enter the presidential race.
In an hourlong meeting with her staff and a 30-minute meeting with Warren, the group of about a half-dozen top progressive activists — including three who are active in the movement — did not discuss the draft campaign. Instead, the conversation focused on issues of social and racial justice. The activists highlighted specific issues the senator can use to influence the presidential debate in 2016 and, they hope, push Hillary Clinton to the left on issues including police brutality, immigration reform, prison privatization, and reducing fees to promote naturalized citizenship, among others.
The meeting’s purpose was to see “how Elizabeth Warren, with her platform, could work with us to move a progressive vision for the country and really engage with communities of color,” said attendee Jonathan Westin, director of New York Communities for Change. “That goes hand in hand with what she’s already doing.” Warren is addressing problems that are “part and parcel of what we believe is wrong with this country,” he said.
An aide to Warren maintained that the senator did not know the group she was meeting with had any connection to the Run Warren Run campaign until POLITICO informed her office. “The point of the meeting was to discuss economic and social justice issues,” the aide said. “As Sen. Warren has said many times, she does not support the draft group’s efforts and is not running for president.”
But Westin is a vocal supporter of the campaign to draft Warren and, as a co-chair of New York’s Working Families Party, voted last February for the political party to join the “Run Warren Run” coalition. Just weeks before the sit-down with Warren, he wrote a blog post for MoveOn.org calling for her to run for president. His co-author on the piece, Katelyn Johnson, executive director of Chicago’s Action Now Institute, also attended the sit-down with Warren.
“Elizabeth Warren is not the only candidate who could ensure a robust presidential primary, but she is the best,” they wrote. “[Warren] is the one who can truly give Clinton a run for the money and yes, even has a shot to win the nomination. We urge Warren to acknowledge the importance of this political moment and enter the race.”
At the meeting with Warren, they were also joined by Daniel Altschuler, managing director of the Make the Road Action Fund, which is also on the advisory council of the Working Families Party and supports the draft Warren movement. But no effort was made during the meeting to urge the senator to enter the race.
“This was about someone who we want to be sharing the issues that are affecting communities of color and working-class communities to make her the strongest possible champion on those issues,” Altschuler said. “The senator has been a tremendous champion on issues of the financial system run amok and income inequality. We think that a lot of the issues affecting our communities are tied to those big financial systems; we wanted to share some of the issues we’re working on.”
Some in the group — which included Shabnam Bashiri from Rise Up Georgia; Bill Bartlett from Action United, a Pennsylvania group; and Brian Kettenring, co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy — privately pointed out that November 2016 is a long way off and insisted there is still plenty of time for Warren her to get in the race if she decides to do so.
If Warren wants the group to stand down, the meeting with some of its diehard supporters did little to advance that goal.
“I would still love to see her run for president,” said Westin, speaking after the meeting. “Connecting with the grass-roots groups is a very big piece of how we continue to amplify her message. People are getting away with murder — literally and figuratively, on Wall Street.”
The Run Warren Run campaign was launched in December by Democracy for America and MoveOn and coordinates with Ready for Warren, another group urging the senator to run. In a letter to the Federal Election Commission from her attorney last August regarding the Ready for Warren PAC, Warren said she “does not, explicitly or implicitly, authorize, endorse, or otherwise approve of the organization’s formation or activities.”
But many who met with her last month share the position that Clinton needs a serious primary challenger.
“The Democratic Party needs a contested primary,” said Jennifer Epps-Addison, director of Wisconsin Jobs Now, who also was in the Warren meeting. “Black folks in our communities have been systematically attacked. It’s not simply about police brutality. Our goal in talking to Warren was to make those connections the same way we did during the civil rights movement.” She said her goal is to get Warren “to be talking about racial justice as part of her progressive message.”
While she is not part of the movement to draft Warren, Epps-Addison added, “We feel that many Democrats are not speaking truthfully to the values that many of the base and voters are concerned about, including black folks.”
In the absence of a competitive Democratic primary, however, some progressives are hoping they can at least push Warren to be the party’s agenda-setter.
“For Sen. Warren, you’re seeing her evolve from a very effective advocate on a set of issues into more of a movement leader and a party leadership role,” said Kettenring. “We’re all evolving, and she is, too. That’s part of the dynamic at work here. Some of the people I know who were in the ‘draft Warren’ movement are people we work with and know, because they’re part of the broader progressive ecosystem. I’d say more of us are stepping up to define the terms of the debate.”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/warren-met-privately-with-draft-warren-supporters-117671
Fed, Eager to Show It’s Listening, Welcomes Protesters
WASHINGTON — When a dozen protesters in green T-shirts showed up two years ago at the Federal Reserve’s annual...
WASHINGTON — When a dozen protesters in green T-shirts showed up two years ago at the Federal Reserve’s annual conference in Jackson Hole, Wyo., they were regarded by many participants as an amusing addition.
Two years later, they have won a place on the schedule.
The protesters, who want the Fed to extend its economic stimulus campaign, are scheduled to meet on Thursday with eight members of the central bank’s policy-making committee. At the start of a conference devoted to esoteric debates about monetary policy, officials will hear from people struggling to make ends meet.
The Fed’s effort to show that it is listening to its critics reflects the central bank’s broader struggle to find its footing in an era whose great challenge is not the strength of inflation, but the weakness of economic growth.
Officials are wrestling with the limits of monetary policy, the focus of the conference, even as they try to address simmering discontent among liberals who want stronger action and among conservatives who say the Fed has done too much.
The meeting also represents an unlikely victory for Ady Barkan, the 32-year-old lawyer who decided in 2012 that liberals should pay more attention to monetary policy. He now heads the “Fed Up” campaign, a national coalition of community and labor groups that plans to bring more than 100 protesters to Jackson Hole.
“We want to make sure that regular voices are being heard,” Mr. Barkan said in beginning the campaign two years ago. The American economy, he said, was not working for all Americans — particularly not for blacks and other minority groups.
Fed officials so far have chosen to accommodate the group by applauding its efforts at public education, not by seriously engaging its arguments that interest rates should be raised more slowly. Esther George, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, which hosts the Jackson Hole conference, arranged Thursday’s meeting with the activists. She said in an interview earlier this year that the Fed must balance job growth with other issues, like financial stability.
“I am completely sympathetic,” she said of the group’s concerns.
But she cautioned that the Fed’s powers were limited. Pushing too hard to lower unemployment could lead to higher inflation, or speculative bubbles, that would force the Fed to raise interest rates more quickly. The resulting economic volatility could end up doing more harm than good.
“The Federal Reserve has become somehow the answer to many problems far beyond what we can actually address,” she said. “I wish I could fix all of it with a tool like monetary policy. But we can’t.”
Even Mr. Barkan’s supporters acknowledge the long odds. Fed Up’s budget has grown to $2 million this year, from $145,000 in 2014, mostly from Good Ventures, a nonprofit foundation created by the Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, which describes the campaign as “relatively unlikely to have an impact.”
Fed Up’s more visible success has come in pursuit of a longer-term goal: advocating for changes in the Fed’s governance that could eventually shift its decision-making.
In a report published earlier this year, Fed Up highlighted the Fed’s lack of diversity. There are no blacks or Hispanics among the 17 officials on the Fed’s policy-making committee of 12 regional bank presidents and five governors. No black or Hispanic has ever served as president of a regional reserve bank.
Moreover, the report said that whites composed 83 percent of the directors of the Fed’s 12 regional reserve banks, who select the regional presidents.
Narayana Kocherlakota, former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, said that the absence of minorities was “quite troubling.”
“Those kinds of persistent absences of key demographic groups really suggest that the appointment process, there is something that can be fixed there,” he said.
Fed Up also argued that bank executives should not sit on regional Fed boards. Under current law, bankers hold three of the nine seats on each board. The regional reserve banks are owned by the commercial banks in each district, although they operate under the authority of the Fed’s board, a government agency whose members are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.
In May, 127 congressional Democrats signed a letter to Janet L. Yellen, the Fed chairwoman, calling attention to the Fed’s lack of diversity and the influence of the banking industry.
On the same day, a spokesman for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign said in a statement that “Secretary Clinton believes that the Fed needs to be more representative of America as a whole and that common sense reforms — like getting bankers off the boards of regional Federal Reserve Banks — are long overdue.”
Two months later, the Democratic Party adopted a campaign platform that included similar language, the first time in recent decades it mentioned the Fed.
Andrew Levin, an economist at Dartmouth College, said Fed Up’s greatest chance for significant influence was not in framing the current debate about interest rates, but in changing the Fed itself. He co-wrote a report that the campaign published Monday detailing a proposal to make the Fed a fully public institution.
“Having a diverse set of policy makers — including African-Americans and Hispanics — will influence the Fed’s decision-making,” he said. “And it should. The public should have confidence that the public is well represented at the F.O.M.C. table.”
Mr. Barkan started the “Fed Up” campaign after joining the Center for Popular Democracy in 2012, a few years after graduating from Yale Law School. He had read a 2011 article by the journalist Matthew Yglesias, titled “Fed Up.” Unions and other advocacy groups were focused on minimum-wage laws. Mr. Barkan was compelled by the argument that they also should be focused on interest rates.
“Even if they move once less over the course of several years, that’s still massive,” he said earlier this year. “The number of people who have jobs because of that, or higher wages, that dwarves a $15-an-hour wage increase in a smaller city.”
The campaign has gained traction in part because the Fed is eager to show that it is listening. During the first protest two years ago, Mr. Barkan approached Ms. Yellen, who listened politely and invited him to bring a group of workers to Washington, where she met with them in November 2014.
Lael Brainard, a Fed governor who plans to attend the Thursday meeting, made a point last year of visiting the parallel conference Mr. Barkan staged on the sidelines of the Fed event. And Mr. Barkan’s group has now succeeded in persuading each of the regional reserve presidents to meet with groups of local workers.
Neel Kashkari, the new president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, met with Fed Up’s local affiliate, Neighborhoods Organizing for Change, this month, telling the group that he shared their concern about the persistence of higher rates of unemployment among blacks and other minority groups.
Mr. Kashkari also accepted an invitation to spend a day with one of the group’s members, Rosheeda Credit, a Minneapolis resident who described the struggles she and her boyfriend faced to cover the cost of rent and child care for their five children.
“Walking a day in somebody else’s shoes is actually — it makes the anecdotes that much more real,” Mr. Kashkari, who arrived at the bank in January, told reporters after the meeting. “It influences how I think about the problems we face.”
By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM
Source
These Organizations Are Working To Help Puerto Rico's Recovery Efforts
These Organizations Are Working To Help Puerto Rico's Recovery Efforts
Puerto Rico was badly damaged by Hurricane Maria. The storm caused billions of dollars worth of property damage....
Puerto Rico was badly damaged by Hurricane Maria. The storm caused billions of dollars worth of property damage. Efforts to repair and rebuild houses, roads, and telecom infrastructure are going to take months. Around half of the U.S. territory's residents lack cell phone service. More than eight out of every ten people in Puerto Rico still don't have electricity.
Read the full article here.
6 days ago
6 days ago