Room for Debate: The Public Pension Problem
Bring Financial Managers in House The New York Times - December 5, 2013, by Connie Razza - This past year, investment...
The New York Times - December 5, 2013, by Connie Razza - This past year, investment management fees on New York City pensions increased 28 percent. Over the past seven years, they have more than doubled to $472.5 million annually. The city pays very high fees even in years when the funds lose value.
Internal control of pension fund assets for public workers will help rebalance a city's relationship with Wall Street.
These fees unduly burden the funds and add to the uncertainty with which our city's retired and current employees face the future. The rapid rise in pension fund fees is just one of many symptoms of our badly broken financial system, which fails to serve the broader economy and promote general prosperity. Instead, it promotes and exacerbates inequality. As part of the New Day New York Coalition, the Center for Popular Democracy has proposed a sweeping solution. New York should create a highly skilled in-house financial management team for pension fund assets. Even with salaries high enough to attract top quality managers, the city would not pay the typical "2 percent of assets under management, plus 20 percent of profits" that hedge funds, private-equity firms and real-estate firms typically charge. The profit motive of in-house managers will be fully aligned with city employees and they will be better situated to ensure that investments are financially responsible, contributing to our broader economy and to the funds' bottom line. The creation of the in-house financial team would save the pension funds hundreds of millions of dollars a year. As significant a change as this would be, it is an idea that the city's former chief investment officer has advocated, and that incoming city comptroller Scott Stringer has expressed interest in. Also, pension funds in Alaska, California, Wisconsin and Ontario, Canada, already do this, to varying degrees. All of these funds also rely on outside managers for some of their investments, but insourcing much of the pension investment management would give the city funds meaningful leverage when working with outside management firms. Building an internal capacity to manage the pension fund assets of city workers is an important step toward rebalancing the city's relationship with Wall Street.
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Fed Up Campaign Celebrates Victory for Working Families as Fed Holds Off on Rate Hikes
“This is a victory for the working families who stepped up with innovative organizing to send the Fed a clear message:...
“This is a victory for the working families who stepped up with innovative organizing to send the Fed a clear message: Our voices belong in the debate about our economy,” said Ady Barkan, Campaign Director for Fed Up. “With the recovery still far too weak in too many communities, it would have been economically devastating – and immoral – to slow the economy.”
“We applaud Chair Yellen and the Federal Reserve for resisting the pressure being put on them to intentionally slow down the economy. Weak wage growth proves that the labor market is still very far from full employment. And with inflation still below the Fed’s already low target, there is simply no reason to raise interest rates anytime soon. Across America, working families know that the economy still has not recovered. We hope that the Fed continues to look at the data and refrain from any rate hikes until we reach genuine full employment for all, particularly for the Black and Latino communities who are being left behind in this so-called recovery.
The campaign held a rally outside the building where Chair Janet Yellen made the announcement this afternoon. Fifty workers gathered to tell their stories and call on the Fed not to intentionally slow down the economy. They were joined by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), who introduced today the Full Employment Federal Reserve Act of 2015, which would enhance the Fed’s full employment mandate.
Throughout late 2014 and 2015, the Fed Up campaign has elevated the voices of working families, meeting with four of the five Fed Governors and six of the twelve regional Fed presidents. Workers across the country have talked about the tremendous racial and economic disparities that still afflict the economy, and the need for genuine full employment that creates rising wages and more jobs for all communities. It has enlisted the support of economists like Nobel Laureate Joe Stiglitz, the involvement of four of the nation’s largest progressive digital advocacy organizations, and over 120,000 supporters around the country.
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The Center for Popular Democracy promotes equity, opportunity, and a dynamic democracy in partnership with innovative base-building organizations, organizing networks and alliances, and progressive unions across the country. CPD builds the strength and capacity of democratic organizations to envision and advance a pro-worker, pro-immigrant, racial justice agenda.
Más alta la factura de luz y otras implicaciones de los acuerdos de la junta
Más alta la factura de luz y otras implicaciones de los acuerdos de la junta
Encubrimiento de violaciones de ley, conflicto de intereses, ganancias desmedidas de especuladores financieros y...
Encubrimiento de violaciones de ley, conflicto de intereses, ganancias desmedidas de especuladores financieros y mayores cargas económicas para el pueblo son algunas de las implicaciones de los acuerdos que la Junta de Supervisión Fiscal está negociando con los acreedores del gobierno, según el Frente Ciudadano por la Auditoría de la Deuda.
Read the full article here.
#FedSoWhite? Lawmakers complain about Federal Reserve's lack of diversity
#FedSoWhite? Lawmakers complain about Federal Reserve's lack of diversity
More than 120 members of Congress say the Federal Reserve has a striking diversity problem similar to the one that hit...
More than 120 members of Congress say the Federal Reserve has a striking diversity problem similar to the one that hit Hollywood's Academy Awards the past two years, and it's harming the economic prospects of millions of Americans.
The lawmakers -- including Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), as well as Reps. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) and John Conyers (D-Mich.) -- wrote to Fed Chairwoman Janet L. Yellen on Thursday complaining about what they called "the disproportionately white and male" leadership at the nation's central bank.
"Given the critical linkage between monetary policy and the experiences of hardworking Americans, the importance of ensuring that such positions are filled by persons that reflect and represent the interests of our diverse country, cannot be understated," said the letter, signed by 116 House members and 11 Senators.
"When the voices of women, African Americans, Latinos, and representatives of consumers and labor are excluded from key discussions, their interests are too often neglected," said the lawmakers, who were all Democrats except for Sanders, an independent running for the party's presidential nomination.
The diverse group of House and Senate members praised Yellen, the first woman to lead the Fed, for her "strong leadership" and efforts to help raise wages while combatting economic inequality.
But they said the Fed had failed to fulfill its statutory obligation to “represent the public, without discrimination on the basis of race, creed, color, sex, or national origin" and called on Yellen "to take steps to promptly begin to remedy this issue."
All five members of the Fed Board of Governors are white and three are men.
All 10 voting members this year of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the monetary policy-setting body that includes Fed governors and a rotating set of regional Fed bank presidents, also are white and six are men, the letter said.
In addition, 11 of the 12 regional Fed bank presidents are white and 10 are men, with no African Americans or Latinos.
When the voices of women, African Americans, Latinos, and representatives of consumers and labor are excluded from key discussions, their interests are too often neglected.
— Letter from lawmakers to Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet L. Yellen
Regional presidents are appointed by the directors of each Fed bank. The Fed's Board of Governors in Washington approves the appointments.
In addition, the lawmakers cited a recent study by the Center for Popular Democracy, a worker advocacy group, that said that 39% of all regional Fed bank directors came from financial institutions, while 11% were from community, labor or academic organizations.
Fed spokesman David Skidmore said the central bank was "committed to fostering diversity -- by race, ethnicity, gender, and professional background -- within its leadership ranks."
The Fed's board has "focused considerable attention in recent years" on recruiting regional bank directors "with diverse backgrounds and experiences," he said.
Minority representation on the boards of Fed banks and branches increased to 24% this year from 16% in 2010, he said. And the proportion of women directors increased to 30% of the total from 23% during that period.
In a blog post in January, the former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Narayana Kocherlakota, raised concerns about diversity on the committee that sets monetary policy.
“There is one key source of economic difference in American life that is likely under-emphasized in FOMC deliberations: race,” he said.
Kocherlakota reviewed committee transcripts from 2010, the most recent available, and said he found no references at meetings "to labor market conditions among African Americans,” even though their unemployment rate never dropped below 15.5% that year.
The lawmakers cited Kocherlakota's post, calling it "unacceptable that discussion of the job market for these populations would be an afterthought, or worse, ignored entirely, and we are concerned that the lack of balanced representation may be a significant cause of this oversight."
Rep. David Scott (D-Ga.), who signed the letter, pressed Yellen at a House hearing in February to consider "getting an African American, for the first time in history, to be a regional president of a Federal Reserve bank."
Yellen said she "absolutely" would and regretted there hadn't been such an appointment.
"It's our job to make sure that every search for those jobs assembles a broad and diverse group of candidates," Yellen said.
The lawmakers said they appreciated her concern about diversity but urged her to do more.
Connie Razza, author of the Center for Popular Democracy report, said the large number of lawmakers who signed the letter showed that support is growing for changes at the Fed to make sure "the economy works for all."
The center coordinates Fed Up, a coalition of labor, community and liberal activist groups that has organized protests outside FOMC meetings urging central bank policymakers not to raise a key interest rate until the job market is stronger.
By Jim Puzzanghera
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Immigrants in US illegally see this election as crucial - See more at: http://www.timescolonist.com/immigrants-in-us-illegally-see-this-election-as-crucial-1.2472426#sthash.BroJZxQz.dpuf
Immigrants in US illegally see this election as crucial - See more at: http://www.timescolonist.com/immigrants-in-us-illegally-see-this-election-as-crucial-1.2472426#sthash.BroJZxQz.dpuf
NEW YORK, N.Y. - There was never any doubt Juana Alvarez's 18- and 20-year-old American-born daughters would be taking...
NEW YORK, N.Y. - There was never any doubt Juana Alvarez's 18- and 20-year-old American-born daughters would be taking part in the election this year. Alvarez did her best to see to that.
"I had two people I wanted to get registered and I registered them," Alvarez, a 39-year-old housekeeper in Brooklyn who came to the U.S. from Mexico as a teenager, said through a translator.
For Alvarez and the estimated 11 million other immigrants living illegally in the U.S., this is a potentially crucial election, with Republican Donald Trump talking about mass deportations and a border wall and Democrat Hillary Clinton pledging to support immigration reform and protect President Barack Obama's executive actions on behalf of immigrants.
Come Election Day, these immigrants will be watching from the sidelines, their future in the hands of others. Under the U.S. Constitution, only full citizens can vote; legal immigrants who are green card holders also are not allowed to cast a ballot.
Trump has spoken of fears of election fraud or that immigrants living illegally in the country might vote. More broadly, he has said all immigrants should play by the legal rules.
Alvarez and others like her say although they can't vote, they have been taking part in get-out-the-vote efforts among citizens.
In places like New York, California, Arizona and Virginia, they have been knocking on doors and making telephone calls, registering people, urging them to go to the polls, and telling their stories in hopes of persuading voters to keep the interests of immigrants in mind when they go into the booth.
"For me, it's important that those who can vote come out of the shadows and make their voices heard," Alvarez said.
Isabel Medina, a 43-year-old from Los Angeles who has been in the country illegally for 20 years and has three sons, two born in the U.S., has worked phone banks and taken part in voter registration drives for U.S. citizens, making sure that "even though they're frustrated, they are disappointed, they still realize it is really important, that they know the power that they have in their hands."
She says she emphasized the need to vote for all the races, not just the presidency, and the importance of taking part in referendums and propositions.
Even though these immigrants can't vote, their pre-Election Day efforts make a difference, said Karina Ruiz, 32, of Phoenix, who came to the U.S. illegally from Mexico when she was 15 and is acting executive director of the Arizona Dream Act Coalition, an immigrant-advocacy group that has been doing get-out-the-vote work.
"It is making an impact because those people who wouldn't vote otherwise, when they listen to my story and hear their vote does count and make a difference, they're encouraged to participate and be my voice," said Ruiz, who has a work permit and an exemption from deportation under Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy. That policy was created by executive order, one that could be undone by any president in the future.
"I think to myself: I could just vote once, if I had the power to," she said. But "if I can influence 50 to 60 people to go ahead and vote, that's my voice multiplied by a whole lot."
As for what will happen after Election Day, "the uncertainty, it is there, I don't know what's going to happen," said Medina, who avoids talking about the election with her U.S.-born sons because she doesn't want them to get scared that their parents might be deported. "I am worried, yes."
By Deepti Hajela
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City Council group urges JP Morgan Chase to ditch Trump council
City Council group urges JP Morgan Chase to ditch Trump council
As CEOs flee President Trump’s business advisory councils, the City Council’s Progressive Caucus is calling on JP...
As CEOs flee President Trump’s business advisory councils, the City Council’s Progressive Caucus is calling on JP Morgan Chase to do the same.
The move comes as multiple CEOs have ditched a Trump council on manufacturing business in the wake of a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., Saturday. Trump did not condemn white supremacists until Monday; on Tuesday he again insisted violence had come from “both sides.” Merck CEO Ken Frazier was first to depart, calling it a “matter of personal conscience” to stand against intolerance.
Read the full article here.
Two Reports Detail Wide Discrimination Against Transgender Americans
Windy City Media Group - February 18, 2015, by Gretchen Rachel Hammond - When the Supreme Court of the United States...
Windy City Media Group - February 18, 2015, by Gretchen Rachel Hammond - When the Supreme Court of the United States rules on the issue of same-sex marriage later this year, many of the advocacy organizations and groups nationwide that have fought for a resolution to the issue are hopeful that LGBTQ equality will take a giant leap forward. However two reports released February 18 by the Denver-based LGBT think tank The Movement Advancement Project (MAP) starkly demonstrate that the transgender community remains snared in disproportionate inequity, discrimination and oppression in almost all areas of American life—employment, housing, K-12 and higher education, healthcare, pensions, the criminal justice system, immigration, obtaining credit, loans, financial aid or identification documents and even marriage.
The ramifications to the community in terms of poverty, societal attitudes and manifestations of violence against transgender individuals have been bluntly illustrated with the deaths of eight transgender women across the United States in the first seven weeks of 2015.
The data, stories and issues raised in the reports entitled Understanding Issues Facing Transgender Americans and Paying and Unfair Price: the Penalty for Being Transgender in America were assembled and co-authored by MAP alongside the Center for American Progress, the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE), and the Transgender Law Center, in partnership with Center for Community Change, Center for Popular Democracy, GLAAD, National Association of Social Workers, and the National Education Association.
Understanding Issues Facing Transgender Americans details each sphere of society in which transgender Americans face daily discrimination and offers brief recommendations on a local, state and federal level. The figures are sobering.
The report states that one-in-five transgender people have been refused a home or an apartment with laws protecting them on the books in only 18 states and D.C. In schools, 40 percent of gender non-conforming youth have reported some level of harassment with only 13 states offering laws against discrimination because of their gender identity. An astonishing 78 percent of transgender individuals reported being "mistreated or discriminated against at work" while up to 47 percent noted being unfairly denied a job at all. In terms of income, the report cited National Transgender Discrimination Survey (NTDS) figures which stated transgender Americans are "four times more likely to have a household income under $10,000 per year than the population as a whole."
Within the criminal justice system, the report notes that one-in-six transgender people will have been incarcerated at some point in their lives. For Black transgender individuals that figure stands at 47 percent. "Reports from the Bureau of Justice Statistics find that 35 percent of transgender prisoners report experiencing sexual abuse in the last twelve months, compared to 4 percent of all prisoners," the document states while indicating that the disproportionate numbers of low-income transgender people has led to a far greater frequency of police interactions and "higher levels police harassment, imprisonment and violence."
Unfair Price: the Penalty for Being Transgender in America examines that poverty in greater detail. The report lists what it calls two "primary failures of law' as the reason "transgender people in the United States face clear financial penalties and are left economically vulnerable"—pervasive discrimination and a lack of clear legal protections along with hostile educational environments.
The results are denial of employment or harassment while on the job, lower wages, denial of housing and even difficulty accessing homeless shelters, inordinate healthcare costs due to discrimination by insurance companies and healthcare providers and increased difficulty obtaining credit such as a credit card or student loan.
MAP Policy Specialist and Policy Researcher Naomi Goldberg was the lead author on that report while LGBT Movement and Policy Analyst Heron Greenesmith piloted the creation of Understanding Issues Facing Transgender Americans.
Goldberg told Windy City Times that both reports received their genesis from earlier and exhaustive research released by MAP detailing issues facing the LGBT community as a whole. "Beginning last year, we starting releasing issue-specific guides," she said. "Heron released one about the disparities that bisexual face in this country. Often both they and the transgender community are ignored when talking about LGBT people. So this guide about transgender [individuals] is meant to be used as an entry point for people to understand the key areas in which transgender people face challenges."
Goldberg hopes that the reports will be used in multiple areas and across a spectrum of audiences including the media, policy makers and advocacy groups. "It's meant to be another articulation of why protections are needed," she said. "As we see the transgender community gain visibility, a lot of people are coming to understand what it means to be transgender in a new way and I think this guide can be an easily accessible tool for people to talk about the real challenges transgender people face. There's a real opportunity here to articulate the concerns and the needs of the transgender community that is accessible and demystifying."
As a cisgender woman, Goldberg acknowledged that as she began to piece the report together she was surprised at the sheer breadth of discrimination against the transgender community. "It was the ways in which discrimination affects all aspects of life," she said. "In my opinion this is where the work really needs to be focused. We need to understand how to talk about the issues that transgender community face, how to provide recommendations to advance them in the policy sphere and also look at movement capacity—organizations that are doing the work and how to support [them]."
However Goldberg stressed that lack of data concerning the transgender community remains a huge obstacle in creating policy change. "We can probably say that the 2020 census will not be including questions of gender identity and expression," she stated. "There's going to be another fielding of the Transgender Discrimination Survey which uncovered and provided all of us with statistics to pair with people sharing their own stories. Gathering the data is going to be the long game but that is the path forward."
"It's not enough to say 'we're done' when we pass laws," Goldberg added. "This is something the LGBT movement post marriage-equality is going to have to address.
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Big Banks Face Protests Over Treatment of Rank-and-File Employees
American Banker - April 9, 2015, by Kevin Wack - The nation's largest banks are again under attack — this time over how...
American Banker - April 9, 2015, by Kevin Wack - The nation's largest banks are again under attack — this time over how they treat their own rank-and-file employees.
A coalition called the Committee for Better Banks, which includes unions and community groups, is planning protests Monday outside big-bank offices in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn. The organizers are marrying long-standing complaints about the impact of bank practices in low-income neighborhoods and the large salaries of top executives with newer gripes about the banks' treatment of their own tellers and sales representatives. The central message is that the country's biggest banks should be paying higher wages, offering better benefits, and eliminating aggressive sales goals that can create stress for lower-pay employees. "While the financial industry has recovered in a big way since the crash — it's really come back strong — frontline workers have not experienced that," said Aditi Sen, a research analyst at the Center for Popular Democracy, an advocacy organization that released a report Thursday in connection with the upcoming protests.
In May 2014, the annual mean wage for tellers at depository institutions was $26,720, or $12.84 per hour, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
It's not clear whether the upcoming protests will include a substantial number of bank employees. Erin Mahoney, a spokeswoman for the coalition, said in an email that "thousands of bank workers have been engaging with us" using petitions and other methods.
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Amazon Not Happy with Seattle’s New Compromise Head Tax
An open letter May 14 to the city of Seattle from about 55 elected leaders—some from cities on Amazon’s short list for...
An open letter May 14 to the city of Seattle from about 55 elected leaders—some from cities on Amazon’s short list for HQ2—rebuked Amazon for its tactics and its opposition to the tax proposal. “We urge you to remain steadfast in your commitment to this effort to reduce homelessness and the persistent inequities faced by all of our cities,” the leaders wrote to their Seattle colleagues.
Read the full article here.
Lobbyists Know the Fed Has Political Power
Your editorial is exactly right about the lack of impartiality with “The Federal Reserve’s Politicians” (Aug. 29)....
Your editorial is exactly right about the lack of impartiality with “The Federal Reserve’s Politicians” (Aug. 29). While created by Congress, the Fed continues to act as though it is completely unaccountable to the people’s representatives.
As I pointed out to Chairwoman Janet Yellen during a congressional hearing last year, her own calendar reflects weekly meetings with political figures and partisan special-interest groups. Even more troubling, there is a long history of Fed chairs or governors serving as partisan figures in the Treasury or the White House before their appointment. So while the Fed is quick to decry any attempts at congressional oversight, it cannot credibly claim to be politically independent.
We need a rules-based monetary policy that doesn’t leave the Fed with the potential to push an ideologically driven agenda. To make the Fed truly free from politics, the Fed Oversight Reform and Modernization Act of 2015, which my colleagues and I have passed through the House, should be signed into law. The American people deserve transparency at the Fed and market-driven monetary policy that can finally restore confidence in our economy.
Rep. Scott Garrett (R., N.J.)
Glen Rock, N.J.
Your editorial accuses Fed Up, a group representing low-income black and brown communities, of politicizing the Fed, when big banks have always had undue access and influence over the Fed’s policies.
In fact, commercial banks literally own the Federal Reserve. Unlike nearly every other central bank in the world, the Fed isn’t a public institution but instead operates as a joint venture with the banking sector. It is not true that as long as this status quo of Wall Street domination continues, then the Fed is “independent,” but when the Fed Up campaign’s low-income people of color dare to join the monetary-policy conversation, then the Fed’s “independence” has been compromised.
You mention that retirees living off their retirement plans are suffering from a decade of near-zero interest rates. Presumably this refers to retirees who might have a hundred thousand or two tucked away for retirement. This is already far more than the low-wage workers who have joined our campaign will be able to accrue over a lifetime of working.
But let’s take the argument at face value. Even if the Fed were to raise interest rates up to 2%, that’s a mere $2,000 on $100,000 savings over a year. That won’t make much of a difference to how well a middle-class retiree lives, but hiking rates to that level prematurely could cut off struggling families—who are disproportionately people of color—from the added jobs and higher wages they so desperately need.
Shawn Sebastian
Fed Up Campaign
Brooklyn, N.Y.
Lobbying the Federal Reserve as if it is a legislature began with the Humphrey-Hawkins legislation and the Federal Reserve Reform Act of 1977. The chair of the Fed became politicized and conflicted as the act included mandated congressional grilling of the Fed chair, who is now required to stabilize prices, moderate long-term interest rates, while at the same time delivering low unemployment. These lofty goals can’t necessarily be simultaneously executed, as Paul Volcker showed so well when he attacked inflation, effectively saying that employment would rise with a solid economy that had price stability.
Mr. Volcker had the courage to take the abuse and address his critics as he followed a logical path and publicly explained it, but successive chairs have gradually focused more on pleasing the president who appointed them.
Rep. Kevin Brady’s idea for a commission to rethink the idea of the Fed is a good start. We now have about 40 years of increasing monetary, fiscal and employment messes, with a paralyzed Fed, unsustainable deficits and underemployment because politics tramples economic common sense.
Larry Stewart
Vienna, Va.
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6 days ago
6 days ago