Loan market shrugs off prison financing protests
Advocacy groups in New York gathered Wednesday near JP Morgan Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon’s apartment, calling...
Advocacy groups in New York gathered Wednesday near JP Morgan Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon’s apartment, calling on the bank to stop lending to private prison and immigration detention companies, according to the Center for Popular Democracy, one of the protest organizers.
Read the full article here.
“These Disasters Aren’t Natural Anymore”: A Dispatch from Puerto Rico After Maria
“These Disasters Aren’t Natural Anymore”: A Dispatch from Puerto Rico After Maria
Several weeks ago, Puerto Rico avoided a direct hit from Hurricane Irma, which shifted north at the last minute. But...
Several weeks ago, Puerto Rico avoided a direct hit from Hurricane Irma, which shifted north at the last minute. But Hurricane Maria hit head on, and has left a humanitarian crisis in its wake. Power on the island could be out for as long as six months, and many parts of the island have yet to be contacted.
Read the full article here.
Im Hinterhof eines Mythos
Silicon Valley - Sitz von Google, Facebook und Co.: If you can make it there, you'll make it anywhere. Was aber, wenn...
Silicon Valley - Sitz von Google, Facebook und Co.: If you can make it there, you'll make it anywhere. Was aber, wenn man es nicht schafft? Oder wenn man kein Hightech-Jünger ist, sondern einfach nur Busfahrer? Das Silicon Valley ist das krasseste Exempel der immer weiter auseinander driftenden US-Gesellschaft.
Das Silicon Valley ist die Pilgerstätte der Hightech-Jünger, ein Magnet für Talente aus aller Welt. Eingeklemmt zwischen Pazifik und San Francisco Bay, liegt die Heimat von Apple, Intel, Google, von Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Facebook und etlichen weiteren Technologiefirmen - und von knapp drei Millionen Menschen. Während die Hard- und Softwarefirmen Spitzengehälter zahlen, fallen die Einkommen der weniger noblen Jobs.
Wer als Lehrer, Verkäufer, Busfahrer oder Maurer arbeitet, kann sich ein Leben im superteuren Silicon Valley kaum mehr leisten, die Zahl der "working poor" wächst - also derjenigen, die trotz Job in Armut leben. Auch die Zahl der Obdachlosen nimmt zu. Der soziale Abstieg kommt mitunter rasant: Eine Trennung, eine Firmenpleite oder ein Unfall können auch einen Aktienmillionär über Nacht zum Sozialfall machen. In den Hinterhöfen des Valley finden sich immer mehr Asyle und Ausgabestellen für Essen und Kleidung. Die Schlangen sind lang für die, die im Schatten des amerikanischen Traums leben.
Das Silicon Valley
"Silicon Valley" ist nur ein Spitzname. Weil Silicon – Silizium – der Grundstoff der Computerchips ist, die hier erfunden wurden. Computerchips, die längst auch in Smartphones, Autos, Spielzeug und Küchenmaschinen stecken. Das Silizium-Tal liegt zwischen San Francisco und San Jose auf einer Halbinsel, die im Westen vom Pazifik und den Santa Cruz Mountains begrenzt wird, im Osten von der San Francisco Bay und, dahinter, dem Höhenzug Diablo Range.
Source: Bayern
Why Is My Bank Teller Trying to Sell Me a Credit Card I Don't Want?
Mother Jones - April 9, 2015, by Josh Harkinson - Until recently, your typical banker was someone whose main job was to...
Mother Jones - April 9, 2015, by Josh Harkinson - Until recently, your typical banker was someone whose main job was to accept deposits, cash checks, and dispense basic financial advice. But now that job hardly exists anymore—at least not as we once knew it. Today's front-line bank workers—tellers, loan interviewers, and customer-service reps—earn far too little money to be considered "bankers" in the traditional sense of the word. And though they still collect and dispense money, their main job involves hawking credit cards and loans you probably don't need.
Many rank and file bank workers are seeing lower wages and more pressure to hawk financial products.Rank-and-file bank workers are both causes and symptoms of America's widening economic divide, says Aditi Sen, the author of Big Banks and the Dismantling of the Middle Class, a report released today by the Center for Popular Democracy. Based on union organizer interviews with hundreds of workers in the industry, Sen found that front-line bank workers often face quotas for hawking potentially exploitive financial products, often to low-income customers, even though the workers themselves barely qualify as middle class. "We can definitely see bank workers as part of the same continuum of issues facing all low-wage workers," she says.
Banks are, of course, notorious for squeezing profits from their employees and customers. In 2011, the Federal Reserve Board fined Wells Fargo $85 million for forcing workers to sell expensive subprime mortgages to prime borrowers. And in late 2013, a judge slapped Bank of America with a $1.27 billion penalty for its "Hustle Program," which rewarded employees for producing more loans and eliminating controls on the loans' quality.
Yet, by some accounts, these sorts of practices are getting worse. In a 2013 study by the union-backed Committee for Better Banks, 35 percent of low-level bank workers surveyed reported increased sales pressure since 2008, and nearly 38 percent stated that there was no real avenue in the workplace to oppose such practices. One HSBC bank employee, according to the study, reported that workers who failed to meet their sales goals had the difference taken out of their paychecks.
The increasing sales pressure comes at a time when the fortunes of the banks and their low-level workers have diverged widely. Bank profits and CEO pay have rebounded to near record levels while wages for front-line workers are stuck in the gutter.
And that's not all. Nearly a quarter of bank workers surveyed in 2013 reported that their benefits had been cut since 2008, and 44 percent reported that their medical and life insurance was inadequate. A recent University of California-Berkeley study found that 31 percent of bank tellers' families rely on public assistance at an annual cost of $900 million to taxpayers.
There are several factors in all of these woes. Mergers and consolidation have led some retail banks to shutter branches and lay people off. Many banks have outsourced customer-service jobs to overseas call centers, and the rise of internet and smartphone banking has further slashed demand for flesh-and-blood tellers. In other words, it's basically the same mix of foreign and technological competition that has concentrated wealth and depressed middle-class wages throughout the economy. And it means that banks can get away with paying people less, and demanding more in return.
But now the Committee for Better Banks is trying to cultivate common cause between low-level bank workers and the customers they're forced to target. The interviews featured in the new report show that many bank workers strongly oppose the sales quotas as unfair and exploitive. For instance:
A teller at a top-five bank reports that she is subject to stringent individual goals on a daily basis: If she does not make three sales-points (selling someone a new checking, savings, or debit card account) each day in a month, she gets written up.
Customer service representatives at a call center for another major bank report that each individual has to make 40 percent of the sales of the top seller to avoid being written up. Selling credit cards counts more towards sales goals than helping someone open up a checking account or savings account, thereby crafting skewed incentives based on the profitability of a product sold, not on how well it matched the needs of a customer.
"There was one guy who had three credit cards and I ended up pushing a fourth on him, even though I knew that was not good for him.""A lot of time people would call and already have one, two, or three credit cards with us," says Liz, a member of the Committee for Better Banks who worked in a Bank of America call center for five years and did not want to give her last name. "They might have a situation where they are low on funds and we end up pushing another credit card on them. There was one guy who had three credit cards and I ended up pushing a fourth on him, even though I knew that was not good for him; he would just be in more debt. But if didn't, I would end up being put in a reprimand."
On Monday, members of the Committee for Better Banks will converge in Minnesota's Twin Cities to deliver a petition to bank offices demanding better pay and more stable work hours for rank-and-file workers, and an end to sales goals that "push unnecessary products on our customers."
Source
A 'striking lack of diversity' at the Fed distorts economic policy in ways most people don’t consider
A 'striking lack of diversity' at the Fed distorts economic policy in ways most people don’t consider
In a new report from the liberal-leaning Fed Up, a coalition of community groups advocating for continued low interest...
In a new report from the liberal-leaning Fed Up, a coalition of community groups advocating for continued low interest rates from the Fed with a view to helping the country's poorer families enjoy some of the benefits of the recovery, the group says a lot of work remains to be done despite recent progress on diversity under Yellen's tenure.
Read the full article here.
Report: Charter schools have lost $30 million since 1997
Times Online - October 2, 2014, by JD Prose - A day after Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School founder Nick Trombetta was...
Times Online - October 2, 2014, by JD Prose - A day after Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School founder Nick Trombetta was in a federal courtroom as part of his ongoing criminal case, a new report cited him as an example of $30 million in fraud and financial mismanagement among Pennsylvania charter schools since 1997.
The report, “Fraud and Financial Mismanagement in Pennsylvania’s Charter Schools,” was done by three organizations, the Center for Popular Democracy, Integrity in Education and Action United.
It piggybacks on a national report on charter schools in May by the Center for Popular Democracy and Integrity in Education that claimed more than $136 million has been lost to waste, fraud and abuse by charter schools.
The Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Schools issued a statement saying allegations of fraud must be investigated.
“However,” the statement continued, “the report draws sweeping conclusions about the entire charter sector based on only 11 cited incidents in the course of almost 20 years, while ignoring numerous alleged and actual fraud and fiscal mismanagement in the districts over the same time period, which dwarf the charter school allegations in terms of alleged misuse of taxpayer dollars.”
To stem the loss of tax dollars by charter schools, the three nonprofit organizations make several recommendations, including annual fraud risk assessments, trained forensic auditors doing reviews, charter school authorizers doing comprehensive reviews every three years instead of every five years, and charter schools posting findings of internal assessments.
City and county controllers should also be authorized to perform fraud risk assessments and fraud audits on charter schools, the groups recommended.
They also suggested that the state attorney general’s office review all charter schools in Pennsylvania, that the Legislature pass a law to protect and encourage charter school whistle-blowers, and that the state declare a moratorium on new charter schools until reforms are implemented.
Trombetta, who faces 11 federal charges, including mail fraud and filing false tax returns, is cited as one example in the report. On Tuesday, he was in court trying to get recordings tossed in the case, in which he is accused of using various offshoots of PA Cyber to siphon away millions of taxpayer dollars.
The coalition said the report’s recommendations should be applied to traditional school districts as well as charter schools “in the name of intellectual integrity.” If not, it would just be an example of pursuing a political agenda, the coalition said.
Not surprisingly, the president of the National Education Association issued a statement trumpeting the report’s findings and blasting charter school supporters, especially Gov. Tom Corbett. “It’s time for lawmakers to stop providing charter industry players a blank check with little oversight and no accountability,” said Lily Eskelsen Garcia.
“Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett and other politicians in the state continue to push for privatization, despite compelling evidence of fraud and abuse of taxpayer funds in the charter school industry,” Garcia said.
Source
Economic Sector Bias at the Federal Reserve
In part one of this two-part posting, I looked at the gender bias at the Federal Reserve, showing how men vastly...
In part one of this two-part posting, I looked at the gender bias at the Federal Reserve, showing how men vastly outnumber women in key posts at Federal Reserve Banks throughout the United States despite the Fed's Congressional mandate. In part two of this posting, I want to take an additional look at the Fed's bias; its failure to represent the economic diversity of America.
For those of you that either didn't read part one or who are unaware of the Federal Reserve's organizational setup, here is a graphic from a report by the Center for Popular Democracy showing the link between the Federal Reserve and its Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) and its district banks known as Federal Reserve Banks:
Here is a map showing the regions covered by each of the 12 district banks (Federal Reserve Banks) and the 24 branches within each district:
Note that Alaska and Hawaii are covered by the San Francisco district.
If we start at the top of the organizational chart, the seven members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate for a 14-year term of office. The President (and Senate) also confirm two members of the Board to be Chair (currently Janet Yellen) and Vice Chair for four year terms. The FOMC consists of 12 members; the seven aforementioned Board members, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and four other regional Federal Reserve Bank presidents on a rotating, one-year term basis. The Federal Reserve Banks form an important link between the Federal Reserve and their local economy and help to dictate the Federal Reserve's monetary policies. Each of the twelve district banks has their own president and boards of directors (nine directors in total for each bank); in addition, each of the 24 district branches has its own directors (seven directors in total for each branch). The Board of Directors for each Reserve Bank are appointed in two ways; the majority are appointed by the Reserve Bank and the remainder are appointed by the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors. The directors for each district bank then appoint their own president and vice president. It all sounds rather nepotistic, doesn't it?
By law, under the Federal Reserve Reform Act of 1977, the Boards of Directors of the Federal Reserve are to be
"...elected with due but not exclusive consideration to the interests of agriculture, commerce, industry, services, labor and consumers.".
That is, each of the leaders/directors of the world's most influential central bank and its district banking system are to represent a wide variety of each of the economic sectors that make up the American economy.
The report by the Center for Popular Democracy compares the economic sector representation during the period from 2006 to 2010 when the Government Accountability Office examined the composition of the Federal Reserve Bank Boards and the present. Here is a graphic showing the past and present composition:
In both 2006 to 2010 and 2016, directors from the banking sector filled over one-third of the board seats, growing by 3 percentage points over the timeframe of the study. In combination, in 2016, representatives from the commercial and industrial sector and the banking sector filled 68 percent of seats, up from 63 percent in 2006 to 2010. The service sector's representation fell from 26 percent of seats to 18 percent and agriculture and food processing saw their representation fall from 6 percent of seats to 3 percent. Interestingly, even though they are relatively poorly represented compared to the other sectors, the number of directors affiliated with consumer and community organizations rose from 3 percent to 8 percent.
For your illumination, here are a few of the Directors for each of the Federal Reserve Banks that you can get a sense of who is dictating America's monetary policies:
If you are interested in who is on the boards of the other Federal Reserve Banks, please see the original report.
Interestingly, during the "financial crisis" of 2008, there was some question about directors' independence and actions taken by the Federal Reserve banks since there was at least the perception of conflicts of interest when director-affliated institutions took part in the Federal Reserve System's emergency programs. With a preponderance of representation from the banking and commercial sectors, it certainly doesn't take a genius to figure out which sectors of the economy will likely be favoured by Federal Reserve policies should there be another "financial crisis", does it?
By A Political Junkie
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Uniting to Improve Wages and Conditions for Workers
Huffington Post - February 26, 2013, by Camille Rivera - In March of 1968 -- just three weeks before he was...
Huffington Post - February 26, 2013, by Camille Rivera - In March of 1968 -- just three weeks before he was assassinated -- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. declared in a speech that one of the great lessons of the civil rights struggle was that it was not just about integration -- but also about economic justice.
"We know now that it isn't enough to integrate lunch counters," Dr. King said. "What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn't have enough money to buy a hamburger? ... What does it profit one to be able to attend an integrated school, when he doesn't earn enough money to buy his children school clothes?"
Unfortunately, 45 years later, we can still ask those questions.
New York is one of the richest cities in America, but it also has one of the widest income inequality gap in the nation: A report last year found that the top one percent of income earners made 32 percent of the income.
We have far too many hard-working New Yorkers, many of them people of color, working at or below minimum wage, often without overtime and benefits. They work in car washes, fast food restaurants, as airport security guards and in food service and small supermarkets.
That's Why UnitedNY, Make the Road NY, New York Communities for Change and labor organizations like the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union and 32BJ SEIU supported the workers when they formed an unprecedented coalition across all industries last summer, and held a big rally and march in New York City on July 24.
Since then, there have been actions, a boycott and a one-day fast food walk out -- all of which generated a great deal of public support. Five car washes have voted to join RWDSU; some supermarkets have settled unfair labor practices suits and agreed to pay a combined $750,000 in lost wages and back pay.
That's also why UnitedNY and the Center for Popular Democracy released a report on the ongoing plight of low-wage workers in New York City at a "Workers Rising" symposium on Feb. 13. The report spelled out the problem -- and organizing efforts -- and offered a list of recommendations to improve wages and working conditions for those at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder.
The recommendations range from supporting legislation to allow paid sick days for workers, to establishing a Mayor's Office of Labor Standards to ensure that employment laws are enforced, to urging New York State to allow the City to set a minimum wage higher than the State minimum, due to the higher cost of living in the five boroughs. These proposals are the result of conversations with workers who have struggled for far too long to make ends meet. They are the result of hearing from families who have lost loved ones who could not afford to take time off from work to get the medical care they needed before it was too late.
Hundreds of workers, advocates and community members turned out for the symposium, which featured lively panel discussions about strategies to help lift low-wage workers into the middle class. The energy inside those rooms was electric; the air was thick with hope and dreams.
A gaggle of elected officials was on hand for the Workers Rising event, including two declared mayoral candidates -- Public Advocate Bill de Blasio and former city comptroller Bill Thompson - as well as City Council members and others.
The report came just one day after President Obama said in his State of The Union speech that America should not be a place where working people who make minimum wage are still in poverty.
"That's wrong," he told a joint session of Congress. "In the wealthiest nation on earth, no one who works full-time should have to live in poverty."
Obama called for raising the federal minimum wage to $9 an hour, with indexing tied to cost of living increase. That's certainly a lot better than $7.25, which is the minimum wage at the federal level and in the State of New York, but nowhere near enough in New York City.
The UnitedNY/CPD report said raising the minimum wage to $10 an hour would allow full-time workers to make just $20,000 a year. The report also noted that more than 110,000 full-time workers live in poverty.
Any way you look at it, an increase in the minimum wage is overdue, and needs to be enacted immediately. If it can't be approved on the federal or state levels, those of us here in New York City must find a way to increase it locally. It is clear that $7.25 an hour is not enough to make ends meet, and the time for change is now.
All in all, the symposium helped to foster real conversation between elected officials, policy experts, and the low-wage workers themselves about the economic issues that are plaguing New York's workforce. Symposium attendees left the conference energized, engaged and filled with hope. They would have made Dr. King proud.
Source: Huffington Post
Will last-minute work soon be history?
When Russell Miller worked at Abercrombie, one of his days each week had to be an on-call day. He wouldn’t know if he’...
When Russell Miller worked at Abercrombie, one of his days each week had to be an on-call day. He wouldn’t know if he’d have to show up to work until an hour in advance.
“You had to block out that time period as if you were working,” he says. One store he worked at was 45 minutes from his house. “We had to be ready to be there on time. With all the regulations about what we wear, how we look and how we present ourselves, I had to get fully ready for my shift and ready to walk out the door at the time I made the phone call to find out if they were even going to need me or not.”
For Miller, this was more than an inconvenience.
“Having a second job wouldn’t work at a time when I was scheduled for an on-call shift. If they scheduled me for an on-call shift and they didn’t call me, that was real money lost and real time opportunity lost.”
On-call scheduling “means you have to put your life on hold,” says Rachel Laforest, director of the Retail Action Project, a division of the Retail Wholesale and Department Stores Union. “It becomes very difficult to lead full lives, so for example, if I’m a parent and I have to figure out arranging for child care, it’s impossible for me to do that” with such short notice, she says.
There isn’t good national data on the prevalence of on-call scheduling, but regional surveys suggest it’s widespread and not limited to retail, says Stephanie Luce, professor of labor studies at CUNY. “We see it in fast food, airlines, beauty services, domestic services, child care services," she says. "Smaller studies seem to suggest this practice really picked up after the recession, however, over the past couple of years, there’s been a real push back.”
After New York’s attorney general suggested Abercrombie and 12 other companies were potentially violating New York law through the practice, Abercrombie announced it would work to discontinue the practice.
The company responded on August fifth “...we understand – and share – the attorney general’s concerns about call-in shift scheduling. The attorney general’s letter helped focus our ongoing internal discussions about how to create a stable and predictable work environment as possible for our employees.”
Gap Inc. told Marketplace: “Each of our brands have made a commitment to evaluate their practices and determine where we may be able to improve scheduling stability for our employees, while continuing to drive productivity in stores.”
Gap also says it’s working on a pilot project with University of California, Hastings College of the Law “to examine workplace scheduling and productivity. Led by recognized expert professor Joan Williams, the goal of the Gap Hourly Scheduling Initiative is to use research and data to create solutions that will be sustainable and can be implemented across our company’s entire footprint and fleet."
Under pressure from a lawsuit, Victoria’s Secret discontinued on-call scheduling earlier this year.
To the extent firms are reconsidering the practice, the reasons are both technological and monetary.
On-call scheduling resulted from pressure to restrict the ratio of hours to sales and an attempt to more nimbly adapt to changes in demand, says University of Chicago associate professor Susan Lambert. It also results in companies “overhiring,” using many part time workers instead of fewer full time workers. But Lambert says “the costs of managing this way do not enter the balance sheets of firms.” Employees who work irregularly, for example, may not always be up to speed with the latest changes to the store or the layout, she says.
“From a very engineering standpoint,...[on-call scheduling] may look efficient but when you look on front lines of firms, you see all the opportunities costs there are in terms of people walking out because they can’t find something or can’t get help.”
Another factor is technology.
“New technologies give us now the ability to predict very well variations in demand,” Lambert says.
Companies don’t need to keep workers on hold; they can figure out pretty well whether they need to have someone show up to work far in advance of two hours before the shift starts, she says. Companies are so good at predicting demand that they tried to "overoptimize" down to the minute, keeping workers on call to cover even slight changes in demand.
“You don’t need to do that micro-management,” she says. “Retailers are learning that."
So it may be, she says, that workers and firms are finding on-call scheduling is a headache for everyone.
Here are the responses from the 13 companies the New York attorney general wrote warnings to:
Ann Inc.: "Staffing guidelines do not include the practice of on-call shifts."
Gap Inc.: "Each of our brands have made a commitment to evaluate their practices and determine where we may be able to improve scheduling stability for our employees, while continuing to drive productivity in stores. As part of our commitment to more sustainable scheduling practices, we are working on a pilot project with Gap Brand and UC Hastings College of Law to examine workplace scheduling and productivity."
J.C. Penney Co: "We do not utilize on-call scheduling, and JCPenney has always maintained a policy against the practice."
Sears Holdings Corp: "Sears Holdings does not use on-call scheduling for store associates. That said, we will fully cooperate with the New York Attorney General’s office’s requests."
Target Corp: "Target does not use on-call scheduling."
TJX Cos: "We don’t use on-call shifts at TJX and it hasn’t been our practice, i.e. nothing new since April."
Williams-Sonoma Inc: "We actually discontinued [on-call scheduling] for the entire country."
Burlington Stores Inc., Crocs Inc., J. Crew Group Inc. and Urban Outfitters Inc. did not return requests for comment.
Source: Marketplace
Divest From Prisons, Invest in People—What Justice for Black Lives Really Looks Like
Divest From Prisons, Invest in People—What Justice for Black Lives Really Looks Like
This article is the second part of a series of conversations with contributors to the demands of the Movement for Black...
This article is the second part of a series of conversations with contributors to the demands of the Movement for Black Lives. Part One was on reparations.
In July 2015, more than 2,000 members of The Movement for Black Lives—a group composed of more than 50 racial justice organizations—convened in Cleveland to recognize the violence committed against Black people in this country and around the world. At the assembly, participants decided the Movement needed to form a coalition that articulated concrete ways to build a more equitable society. Six legislative platforms emerged that covered issues like economic justice, reparations, political empowerment, and divestment from policing and incarceration. In their Invest-Divest platform, the authors called instead for investment in programming, like restorative justice initiatives, that would decrease incarceration and strengthen communities.
We’ve come to accept policing and incarceration as catch-all solutions.
According to the Brookings Institution, White Americans are equally likely to use and more likely to deal drugs, while African Americans are more likely to be arrested, convicted, and sentenced harshly. For U.S. residents born in 2001, the Bureau of Justice Statistics predicts that 1 in 111 White women will go to prison in her lifetime, while 1 in 18 Black women will. For White men, the likelihood is 1 in 17; for Black men, 1 in 3.
“At the heart of the Invest-Divest demand is the recognition that our city, state, and federal budgets reflect the dehumanization, and the degradation of Black life through lack of investment in anything besides Black incarceration or surveillance,” says Marbre Stahly-Butts, co-author of demands from the Invest-Divest platform that call for reallocating government funds from law enforcement to long-term safety, and decriminalizing drug and prostitution crimes.
Stahly-Butts, a facilitator of the Cleveland convening and deputy director of racial justice at the Center for Popular Democracy, explains that our current criminal justice system is based on a premise of comfort, rather than of safety: Instead of addressing the roots of uncomfortable issues such as drug addiction, mental illness, and poverty, we’ve come to accept policing and incarceration as catch-all solutions. This disproportionally affects African Americans.
Here she discusses why divestment from the prison and military industries is as critical to a just future as investment in public institutions.
The following interview has been lightly edited.
Liza Bayless: How does the Invest-Divest platform play into the Movement for Black Lives?
Marbre Stahly-Butts: The call for Invest-Divest has been at the center of organizing and activism work for at least the last decade, if not more. Since slavery, but especially in the age of mass incarceration in the last 30 or so years, [there has been an] incredible increase in the amount of spending that goes to police departments—to cages, prisons and jails, corrections offices, military equipment, and surveillance equipment. At the same time, [there has been] divestment from the social safety net, from social services and education to affordable housing.
What makes our communities safe is not more guns, more police, or more cages.
What makes our communities safe is not more guns, more police, or more cages, but employment opportunities, safe housing, jobs, education, restorative justice. To live in the world we’re envisioning requires a real investment—both by private parties, but also by public dollars.
Bayless: In August, the Department of Justice announced it would end use of private prisons. How significant is this step?
Stahly-Butts: It’s an important step and in many ways a symbolic step, but I think it’s essential that states follow suit. The caging of our people actually happens on a local level, and so the same week that the Department of Justice made that announcement, I believe in Florida they decided to continue contracts with local prisons and, in fact, expand them.
Most of our people are kept in public facilities, so there’s a real need to decarcerate and not just de-profitize. It would matter a lot if U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement did it, because that’s, in fact, where most of the [prison] beds are.
A month [after the announcement], the Department of Justice released guidelines around its increased funding of police officers and officers in schools. So it’s important to realize that the criminalization—and the incarceration—of our people really is something that the government has not divested from, and in some ways has actively continued.
There’s a lot of work to be done, but I was pleased about implications of ending those contracts.
Bayless: Usually we hear from organizations about investment more than divestment. What makes the concept of divestment so important to this platform?
Stahly-Butts: I think that we see a general narrative on the left around the need to increase infrastructure and investment. Obama, Clinton, and other progressives constantly affirm their commitment to investment strategies, whether it’s health care, job programs, or educational funding. But the divestment piece is essential to a conversation around the livelihood, wealth, health, and survival of Black, brown, and poor communities.
There has to be a conversation about real solutions to incarceration.
If we continue to lock up and put one of every three Black men under police control; if we continue to incarcerate Black women at the highest-growing rates; and continue surveillance and denying people [driver’s] licenses and housing opportunities when they are out of incarceration, [then] we’re undermining our investments if we’re not also divesting from these systems that have led to this mass criminalization of folks for behaviors that often have nothing to do with public safety.
Bayless: The topic of mass incarceration has been at the forefront of the country’s conversations about racial injustice. Is there something missing from that discussion?
Stahly-Butts: It’s essential that we talk about the entire purview of things that don’t belong under the criminal code, from the way poverty is criminalized to the ways homelessness is criminalized. Even in Florida, wearing saggy pants [has been criminalized].
There has to be a conversation about real solutions to incarceration, and not just changing the practices of putting people in cages, but also changing the entire orientation for communities that criminalize them en masse, that have police in schools, that believe that the only answer to mental health and other issues is cages and handcuffs. There’s a real need for cultural change and a social conversation about the roots of the system, and other ways to deal with these issues that is not state violence.
Bayless: By focusing on decriminalization of certain crimes—in this case, nonviolent ones such as drug and prostitution crimes—as fundamentally different from “violent” crimes, is there a risk people convicted of the latter could end up with harsher sentences?
Stahly-Butts: There’s a false dichotomy between violent and nonviolent crimes. We often talk about it as if there’s some fine line, but in fact every state, every city defines that differently. Whether we’re talking about crimes that hurt people or impact property, or crimes that are about mental health or drug addiction, the idea of investment is key to all of them.
Folks are working locally to realize what it means to build alternative structures to criminal justice.
If we use the money that we’re currently using to cage people, and take the literally trillions of dollars to invest in the well-being of our people—in jobs, education, trauma-informed services, restorative justice—we would see a real addressing of all sorts of social issues, including the ones that make people less safe.
Bayless: Anything else you’d like to add about this platform?
Stahly-Butts: Folks are working locally to realize what it means to build alternative structures to criminal justice, to divest from policing and invest in communities. Despite the past two years—where we’ve seen literally dozens of Black folks be killed on video, and uprisings in communities from Baltimore to Ferguson—we’ve seen incredible movement and energy.
By Liza Bayless
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8 days ago
8 days ago