CPD IN THE NEWS

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.

Washington Post - February 19, 2015, by Marc Fisher, Sandya Somashekhar, and Wesley Lowery - In the months following the shooting death of Michael Brown, Tony Rice quit his job to lead nightly protests in Ferguson, Mo. But after a grand jury decided in November not to indict the officer who shot Brown, Rice said, “we just woke up one morning and no one was out there protesting.”

That hasn’t deterred Rice. As the nation’s attention has turned elsewhere, he and fellow activists have switched up their tactics, slowing down and digging in, trying to nurture a nascent civil rights movement by shifting to local issues and a broader critique of American society.

The deadly confrontations in Ferguson; in Cleveland, where police shot and killed a 12-year-old boy who was playing with a pellet gun; and in New York, where police choked and killed a man who was selling loose cigarettes on the sidewalk, prompted young people to take to social media and the streets to express outrage and demand change.

The unrest generated by the deaths of Brown in Ferguson, Tamir Rice in Cleveland and Eric Garner in Staten Island may eventually become the first scene in a stirring saga of how a moment builds into a movement. Or it could end up as a cautionary tale about how a righteous activism born of traumatic incidents fizzles, the energy of dozens of new activist groups sapped by quotidian realities and the shortened attention spans of a society that expresses its political passions in Likes and tweets.

“To go from protesting to power, you need demonstrations, legislation and litigation,” said the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the veteran civil rights leader who has acted in recent months as an informal adviser and cheerleader for several new groups. “Sprinters burn out real fast. These young people need to be in it for the long run. And it must be an intergenerational coalition. A movement that’s mature requires clergy and lawyers and legislators. The struggle is never a one-string guitar.”

The new activists are still trying to tune their instrument. They are still figuring out whether to hew to local issues or go national. For the most part, the young protesters haven’t connected with elders such as Jackson or the Rev. Al Sharpton. They have uneasy relationships not only with civil rights fighters of generations past, but also with the black mayors and police chiefs who owe their own positions to the successes of that earlier activism.

All that adds up to a fractured puzzle composed of idealistic young activists who believe ordinary people can band together to make black lives matter more, but who haven’t yet figured out how to boost their generation into action.

In Ferguson, some activists moved from street actions to events such as “Books and Breakfast,” a giveaway featuring books such as “The New Jim Crow” and “I Love My Hair!” and free yogurt parfaits. One recent day, only a few dozen people stopped by, mostly familiar faces of hard-core activists.

Nonetheless, they talked about marching at a local high school where white students had said disparaging things about black protesters. The meeting ended with pleas from organizers to hug someone in the room and take another look at the books, half of which were left unclaimed.

Two days before the book event in Ferguson, the roads were slick in Cleveland, with heavy snow falling, as about a dozen activists gathered at the Unitarian Universalist Society in Cleveland Heights — a racially and economically mixed suburb up the hill from downtown.

The meeting, called by a local activist group called Puncture the Silence, was an effort to press beyond the squabbles and rivalries that have plagued the protest groups that emerged after the Rice shooting. Although protests have continued almost weekly in Cleveland through a harsh winter, the wait to hear whether the officers involved in the shooting will face criminal charges has left many activists frustrated, splintered by arguments over strategy, objectives and media posture.

Some want more marches, sit-ins and disruptive protests. Others propose to stage a tribunal, rendering an extrajudicial verdict in several cases of police use of force. Still others want a focus on policy, but what should they demand? Body cameras? Special prosecutors? Police training? Collective bargaining?

“We need to keep the direct pressure on elected officials, but we also need to stay active in the streets,” Rachelle Smith, 31, who has been a key player among Cleveland’s young protest groups since the Rice shooting, told the group.

The next move after expressing anger in the street is often the hard part for new civil rights groups. Do they seek changes in the law? Push to elect sympathetic candidates? Focus on winning over those who aren’t yet on their side? Or pull back from the moment and get radical, pressing for wholesale social change?

In Ferguson, many of the more than a dozen organizations that formed in the tear-gas clouds of August fragmented over the course of the fall. Conflicts flared over organizers who spent much of their time honing their profile on Twitter and attending an endless series of conferences on activism. Members of some new groups grumbled about leaders who seemed more interested in scoring airtime with Don Lemon on CNN or winning donations from wealthy celebrities than about recruiting poor people to their cause.

On the night of the grand jury’s decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson in the Brown shooting, Tory Russell and other members of a new civil rights group called Hands Up United knew one thing they had to do: Race to their office to fend off vandals and prevent violence.

Today, six buildings across from the group’s original office remain boarded up. The Metro PCS shop is a blackened heap; a steel bar bears a slogan written in rust: “America Wake Up!”

Hands Up United has moved to a new location but isn’t going away, said Russell, a burly man with a thick beard who wears his devotion to the movement on a T-shirt emblazoned with the first names of young African Americans whose deaths have fueled this fight — Trayvon, Mike, Eric . . .

By the time Brown was killed, Russell, 30, had already dropped his plan to become a teacher — a dream he traces to his days in the library at Sumner High School in St. Louis, alma mater of Chuck Berry and Tina Turner. Today, Russell views his old school as dominated more by in-school suspension than reading books, so he has focused his political work on distributing books on black history and radical politics.

He sees a surer path to change at the neighborhood level than in any effort to win nationwide notice. “And now the real work begins,” Russell said. “You can complain about the system being bad and how it affects the community. But if your room is dirty, you’re going to have to pick up the clothes and wash the dishes. And that’s what we’re doing.”

Hands Up’s leaders haven’t lost sight of the issue of police brutality: “We still believe the ultimate piece of the narrative is that unarmed people are being killed by police,” said Tef Poe, 27, a rapper from St. Louis who started the group with Russell.

But since the TV cameras left town, the heady camaraderie of those first weeks has given way to infighting and a struggle for attention.

Poe joined other organizers on a trip to the Palestinian territories last year and he recently returned from the Sundance Film Festival — decisions that have raised questions among some activists about how groups are spending the hundreds of thousands of dollars that have come in from foundations and ordinary people who hit “donate” buttons online.

Poe and Russell said they are not getting paid by Hands Up. Neither was sure of the exact size of the organization’s budget. Hands Up United — which like many of the new groups has not established nonprofit status of its own — has received organizational help from a group connected with the California antiwar nonprofit known as Code Pink.

Russell said Hands Up United, unlike other groups that flared on TV and Twitter and then disappeared, is in it for the long run. “For some people, when it wasn’t sexy anymore, when CNN left, it died down for them,” he said. “What we’re doing is not hashtag activism, this is actually community organizing. I’ve never seen hashtags change my community.”

Athousand miles away, Hands Up United’s shift in focus from civil disobedience to community development — from leading rallies to giving out books — sounds familiar to Phillip Agnew.

The group he founded in 2012 — after a former neighborhood watch volunteer shot and killed Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black 17-year-old in Sanford, Fla. — had a two-year head start on those that have emerged in Ferguson and Cleveland. Agnew’s Dream Defenders have been through it all: the rush of the marches, a 31-day sit-in in the state capitol, confrontations with the powerful, promises that they would be listened to, frustration when nothing changed.

Now, on the same day that Hands Up United gives out books in Ferguson, Agnew’s Dream Defenders stage a multicultural festival in front of a sprawling, brightly colored mural of Haitian village life in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood. The attractions includesalsa dancing and African drumming; speeches in English, Spanish and Creole; testimonials from farmworkers and college students — all spiced with gentle reminders of the need to do something about the number of young people from Miami’s crazy quilt of impoverished communities who drop out of school, land in prison, or subsist without career or much hope of one.

The Dream Defenders — the name refers to the effort to build on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy — started out demanding the repeal of Florida’s “stand your ground” law, which allows people to use deadly force if they feel threatened by another person. But after their sit-in failed to persuade Gov. Rick Scott (R) to call a special session of the legislature to reconsider the law, Agnew and his fellow Defenders concluded that they needed to move on to “the next phase.”

What that would look like took many months to decide. Agnew — at 29, he is thoughtful yet blunt, insisting on talking about fomenting revolution even when his older advisers counsel more moderate rhetoric — said he was initially distracted by the celebrity that came with being a prominent activist.

“It was very easy to accept invitations all over the country,” he said. “It’s very, very, very alluring and seductive to have folks know you and to go to conferences and workshops every week. I was in Time magazine, on television all the time — it does begin to create some kind of friction within the organization. And then you look up and feel like we haven’t gotten anywhere. We had to pump the brakes.”

Some other groups that formed after Martin was killed have left Florida and are trying to find traction on a nationwide scale. The Million Hoodies Movement for Justice was started by a young Floridian, but its leaders are now spread around the country, active mainly through video and social media.

“Nobody’s going to have their political beliefs changed on Facebook, but it is a way for us to connect,” said Peter Haviland-Eduah, the group’s spokesman, who lives in Michigan, where he is in graduate school. “We want to build coalitions across the country, and we have to find small, tangible wins. The civil rights movement in the ’60s was about changing laws and they had tangible goals, like getting more folks to register to vote. We’re about changing the consensus, changing beliefs, and that’s much more difficult.”

The Dream Defenders concluded that the only way forward is to embed themselves in local issues. “It’s a big mistake for these groups in Ferguson and other places to go national,” said Sherika Shaw, 26, the group’s South Florida coordinator, who left a graduate program in art education after learning about Dream Defenders on Instagram. “The people are here, where you are. It’s not about changing policy; you can’t use the master’s tools to destroy the master’s house. We don’t want to be the people the TV networks call; we want to be who the people call instead of the police when there’s a domestic dispute.”

Shaw spends her days trying to establish Dream Defenders groups in local high schools, appealing to teens to speak out against having uniformed security officers on their campuses.

The group’s core members lived for a time in a borrowed house in the lush suburb of Miami Lakes — the dream house, they called it — allowing them to talk and plan around the clock. They lived on Agnew’s credit card and his savings from four years he spent selling erectile-dysfunction and anti-depression drugs for a pharmaceutical company in North Carolina.

They studied past movements, read history and made two defining decisions: Unlike many other new groups, they would stay local, rooting themselves in Florida’s problems and people. And they would get radical, spurning elective politics and emphasizing their belief that the persistent poverty and social immobility in many black communities result not from specific policies but from the very nature of capitalism and racism.

On one morning in early February, Agnew arrived at work angry because he woke up to a flat tire on his car. “This system of capitalism creates a lot of stress around money,” he said. He put on his black “People Over Money” T-shirt and began another day of trying to convince blacks and Hispanics that the problem they see as police brutality is really far deeper.

“A community that just lost someone to a police shooting may not be ready to hear that,” he said. “They may not have that language. But if we talk to them about what they experience — being ignored, being invisible, the contempt for black people, the contempt for poor people — they begin to see that this is much larger.”

At the street festival, which draws about 150 people over the course of the afternoon, Shamile Louis, the 23-year-old daughter of Haitian immigrants, tries to get that message across. Louis, who has worked with Dream Defenders since her junior year in college, recalls watching George Zimmerman’s trial in Martin’s shooting on TV every day; when he was acquitted, “my soul was shattered,” she said. She spent 27 days at the sit-in at the capitol in Tallahassee. But although she’s still committed to the cause, the realities of surviving are pulling her away from full-time activism.

“I’m going to have to find work,” she said. “The movement is really struggling. We were really amped up at the capitol. The reality now is people have real lives and have to work.”

She spent part of the afternoon at the Dream Defenders table in the center of the courtyard. By day’s end, only six people have signed cards expressing interest in the group’s work.

Jesse Jackson came to Tallahassee to join the Dream Defenders in their sit-in. Sharpton shuttled into Ferguson to lead marches and rustle up media attention. Black clergy and leaders of traditional civil rights groups reached out to the new groups, offering advice and organizational support.

And in December, Agnew and six other leaders of new groups met at the White House with President Obama, who told them he would set up a task force to address the “simmering distrust” between police and African Americans. Agnew came away from the meeting convinced that protest groups must become more radical because change will not come from those already in power.

“The concessions won by the civil rights movement in the ’60s are our biggest obstacle,” he said. “We have black Fortune 500 CEOs, an African American president, African American mayors and chiefs of police, and still the lot of black people, Latino people, has not risen.”

Dream Defenders, which has a minimally paid staff of seven, works largely off a $200,000 grant from the Tides Center, a San Francisco-based foundation that supports groups seeking social change. Agnew said he expects the Tides money to dry up eventually “because in the end, we’re going to be too radical for them.”

In Cleveland, the mayor, police chief and much of the City Council are black, as are many influential pastors. But some young black activists say their fight puts them squarely at odds with the city’s black power structure.

“As an African American guy trying to make a difference, I am fighting the white establishment, and I’m also fighting the black establishment,” said Alonzo Mitch­ell, an organizer who hosts a local radio show and is a regular at council meetings.

When Mitchell, 33, approached a city official to seek backing for a mentorship program for future political leaders, he says he was told: “No one is going to teach you. Power is never given, it’s taken.”

On the city’s west side, below the modest Guide to Kulchur bookstore, an expansive basement meeting room has become the headquarters of an activist collective determined to change how Cleveland police operate.

In the basement one recent afternoon, activists peppered half a dozen council members with demands, insisting that each official complete a report card, answering yes or no to statements such as “The officer who killed Rice should be immediately indicted.” All but one of the council members in attendance said they favored an indictment.

When protesters planned a march after the Rice shooting, Police Chief Calvin Williams volunteered to shut down parts of a highway. Commuters griped about the protests impeding traffic, but Mayor Frank Jackson said “that’s the inconvenience of freedom.” Cleveland police officers working at demonstrations conversed and joked with protesters, a strikingly different approach from officers in St. Louis, who met similar protests with riot gear, tear gas and rubber-coated bullets.

Despite such efforts at cooperation, pressing for change is harder in cities with black elected officials, some veteran civil rights leaders say.

“It is more difficult to organize against a black power structure,” said Lawrence Hamm, 61, who formed the People’s Organization for Progress in Newark in 1983 after a police shooting of an unarmed black man. “You might be marching against a popular black mayor, and it’s going to be harder for you to get people to join you.”

The new groups need help from the old-line black civil rights groups they sometimes view as having sold out, Hamm said: “The black radical organizations — the people who want more fundamental change — are not going to be strong enough to get there on their own.”

Although Hamm’s group still agitates for police overhauls, its founder long ago realized he needed to work both with elected officials and with older, mainstream organizations.

“We formed our group because we felt the traditional civil rights groups were not aggressive enough,” said Hamm. “But now, I belong to three branches of the NAACP.”

Three decades after Hamm set out to be more in-your-face than the black organizations of his parents’ generation, Ciara Taylor, the 25-year-old political director of Dream Defenders, found her way to a more radical path by volunteering in Obama’s 2008 campaign.

Knocking on doors in Vero Beach, Fla., she was called the n-word and confronted with the reality that a black senator’s candidacy for president “does not make race go away,” she said. “There was a great hope within my generation and within me that we could be free of racial identification, but we realized that race does not go away.”

But it took a one-two punch three years later to propel her into full-time activism: In her senior year at Florida A&M University, the school proposed to eliminate her major, Spanish language; she switched her concentration to political science and joined a campaign to reverse the cutbacks. A few months after that, when Martin was killed, Taylor, daughter of a corporate manager and a career Navy officer, felt jolted from her middle-class trajectory.

“Being a young person, you’re impatient,” she said. “You see these trigger moments happen and you automatically want to fight the big beast that our parents tried to protect us from.”

Now, two years into her life as an organizer, Taylor bristles at the notion, expressed by some veterans of the 1960s movement, that the new activism is dissipating. “A lot of the older generation looks at movement work as physically being at a protest,” she said. “That’s important, but a more radical expression of social engagement is simply choosing to love yourself in a society that tells you you look like a thug or your nose is too big.”

When Taylor sees new groups fading away, she doesn’t take that as a defeat, but as a sign that people are “caring for themselves. The fact that a lot of movements are disintegrating comes from the inability to care for oneself, especially mothers with families.”

Ferguson remains a hive of activism. For the first time, the Organization for Black Struggle, which grew out of the Black Power movement of the 1970s and ’80s, has enough money to pay six staff members, thanks to support from individuals and progressive groups such as the Center for Popular Democracy, Color of Change and the Open Society Foundations, which was founded by liberal billionaire investor George Soros.

Seven months ago, Charles Wade was adjusting scarves and trimming hems for Hollywood stars. Now he’s in St. Louis, where the former image consultant to Solange Knowles, Beyoncé’s sister, is alone, in black sweats, scrubbing the floor of a townhouse that is part of a transitional housing program he has set up through his new organization, Operation Help or Hush.

It’s been a trying few days. His asthma was acting up. A protester he’s been housing lost Wade’s credit card while out buying supplies. And on Twitter, he’s dealing with a protester who questioned his funding, his newfound fame as an activist and his devotion to the cause.

“It’s really demoralizing that you have to fight so hard just to do something decent for people,” Wade said.

Immediately after the Brown shooting, Wade, a native of Bowie, Md., started raising money on Twitter to provide food, housing and even expense money for protesters who paused their lives to go into the streets. He raised $25,000 in one week. On one occasion, after putting out a call on Twitter for help for protesters who needed gas money, Wade stood in the parking lot of Andy Wurm Tire & Wheel handing out $20 bills.

Since grand jurors decided not to indict Wilson, many activists have scattered. Wade stayed. He still expects to house 27 new activists by April, and he’s raising money through Twitter and from friends and family.

He’s determined to keep going, he said; there’s so much more to do: “There’s very little we’ve actually gotten for Ferguson except for it to be known nationally.”

Source

Last September 30, community activists and local officials from around the country came to Washington, DC to protest HUD’s pro-Wall Street policies.

Two years ago, community organizing groups around the country, with the key support of Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), began pressuring HUD Secretary Julian Castro to stop selling delinquent mortgages to Wall Street investors and help nonprofit organizations to purchase the loans, help homeowners keep their homes, and expand the supply of affordable housing.

On Thursday, they won. Castro announced a set of policy changes to its Distressed Asset Stabilization Program (DASP) that activists had labeled a “Wall Street giveaway.” Last year, for example, 98% of the mortgages HUD sold went to Wall Street firms, at discounts averaging nearly 50%. Castro pledged to fix the program to triple the sales of delinquent mortgages to nonprofit community groups with experience in stabilizing neighborhoods and helping homeowners and to put more restrictions on foreclosures.

The policy fix was needed because some of the same Wall Street firms that precipitated the housing crash have been buying up distressed housing assets in bulk, including delinquent mortgages and vacant houses that are a product of the crash.

Both Sen. Elizabeth Warren and HUD Secretary Julian Castro are frequently mentioned a potential VP running mates with Hillary Clinton.

The campaign’s victory is the result of a perfect political storm. The organizers mounted a savvy grassroots organizing campaign that built on the momentum of the Occupy Wall Street movement that began in 2011. In the current political season, no politician, especially a Democrat, wants to be too closely identified with Wall Street’s financial industry, which most Americans still blame for the 2008 economic tsunami from which the country still hasn’t recovered. During this presidential season, both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders vied to be the champion of Wall Street reform. HUD Secretary Castro, a former San Antonio mayor, has been auditioning for the role of Clinton’s vice presidential running mate, but many pundits view him as too conservative and cautious — and too pro-business — to help Clinton galvanize both Latino voters and Bernie Sanders’ supporters in the contest with Donald Trump. With his announcement this week, Castro can claim to be on the side of homeowners and communities against Wall Street speculators.

HUD’s DASP program, started by the Obama administration in 2012, became a part of the larger problem by auctioning off its distressed mortgages to the highest bidder, which allowed Wall Street firms to take ownership and accelerate foreclosures.

“This whole process shows just how tilted the playing field is for the big banks and hedge funds,” said Warren, who has been the Senate’s most vocal critic of Wall Street abuses, last year. “Many of these banks and funds were responsible for fueling the housing bubble in the first place — leading to the crash that hit these families like a punch to the gut. Now these same banks and funds are turning around and scooping up these loans at bargain-basement rates so they can profit from them a second time.”

The new HUD policy changes to fundamentally reform the program, resulting in more mortgage pools being sold to non-profits, more foreclosures avoided, and more vacant property turned into affordable housing. The changes include:

Help existing homeowners facing foreclosure remain in their homes by modifying their mortgages to reflect current market values — a strategy called “principal reduction.” Until now, both HUD and Fannie Mae, under pressure from the banking industry, had resisted this approach. Now, even private equity firms and hedge funds will have to use that strategy in reworking troubled mortgages.

Increasing the sale of HUD’s distressed mortgages to non-profit organizations

A commitment to work with local governments and non-profits to target sales to those who will help homeowners keep their houses and expand the supply of affordable housing.

Far greater provisions for transparency in the sale process

“These recent HUD changes move in the direction of common sense policy,” said Maurice Weeks of the Center for Popular Democracy, one of the groups that coordinated the nationwide grassroots campaign. “We shouldn’t be handing over our neighborhoods at bargain basement prices to Wall Street.”

“HUD’s bulk mortgage sale program has been fueling the speculator buy-up of our neighborhoods,” observed San Francisco Supervisor John Avalas, one of many local elected officials who supported the campaign. “Finally, HUD is making changes to this mortgage sales program that better prioritize what our communities need — saving more homes from foreclosure and creating more affordable housing. It’s about time!”

Sarah Edelman, director of housing policy for the Center for American Progress and coauthor of a new report on the problem, told the New York Times that the policy changes “significant improvements” in the loan sale program.

“The policies announced today are a promising step toward more responsible loan auctions,” she said.

Millions of homeowners are still delinquent on the mortgage payments, many through no fault of their own, but because of predatory and reckless lending practices as well as the sluggish recovery of the economy in terms of restoring the incomes of working families. As a result, federal officials and community activists expect there to be many more sales of troubled mortgages that were guaranteed by the federal government.

The policy changes are a culmination of several years of research and activism by grassroots groups on the front lines of the nation’s housing and banking crisis.

Several years ago, different community groups began noticing the growing presence of Wall Street speculators in their neighborhoods, one of the aftershocks of the epidemic of foreclosures. Several local groups examined records, interviewed tenants, and issued reports documenting that in areas where Wall Street investors own a significant number of these single-family homes — including Atlanta, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Miami, Tampa, Orlando, Charlotte, Dallas, Chicago, Detroit, Denver, and Los Angeles and nearby Riverside — their practices have harmed tenants and undermined long-term neighborhood stability.

The activists discovered that HUD, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac — which own or guarantee the distressed mortgages on many single-family homes — were part of the problem. Over the past few years, they’ve auctioned off about 150,000 non-performing loans that they want to get off their books. Of these loans, fewer than two percent have gone to nonprofit buyers. The rest (98 percent) have gone to Wall Street companies. As of last fall, five Wall Street firms — Lone Star, Blackstone Group, Angelo, Gordon & Co., Selene Residential Partners, and the Royal Bank of Scotland — accounted for 64 percent of all the public loan sales. Last year, Goldman Sachs popped up on the purchaser list for the first time, buying loans from Freddie Mac.

The community organizers and their researchers also exposed a double standard. Although Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been unwilling to offer principal reduction to struggling homeowners, and HUD has been unwilling to require principal reduction as part of its program, these agencies often offer steep discounts when they sell these mortgages to Wall Street speculators, who typically foreclose on the homeowners, adding to their inventory of homes scooped up in private foreclosure sales. In unloading these mortgages, the federal agencies often ignored the housing needs of local communities.

The grassroots groups enlisted the help of two national umbrella organizations — the Center for Popular Democracy (a network of community organizing groups) and Local Progress (a network of progressive local elected officials) — as well as Senator Elizabeth Warren, who championed the cause in Congress. These used a variety of tactics — protest actions, internet petitions, and muckraking research — to generate media attention and put pressure on the Obama administration.

These groups — many of which had been working on banking issues for over a decade — launched their national campaign in September 2014. They were relentless in pressuring HUD, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to prioritize non-profits over speculators in their sales of troubled mortgages. In particular, they demanded that these agencies prioritize sales to non-profit Community Development Finance Institutions (CDFIs) that have the capacity to purchase large inventories of underwater mortgages and distressed properties — including vacant houses that owners lost through foreclosure and occupied homes where underwater borrowers are on the brink of foreclosure — and stabilize them as affordable housing. The CDFIs were being crowded out by hedge funds working hand in hand with HUD, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac.

At the start of the campaign, the activists released a report, Vulture Capital Hits Home: How HUD is Helping Wall Street and Hurting Our Communities, that explained why HUD’s policy of favoring Wall Street investors was exacerbating the nation’s housing crisis.

A week before Christmas in 2014, at rallies outside local HUD offices, community groups in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Boston presented HUD with their “Grinch of the Year” award for refusing to fix the DASP program.

“By auctioning pools of delinquent loans to the highest bidders — vulture capitalists — HUD is driving unnecessary foreclosures and contributing to the rise of ‘Wall Street Landlords,’” said Gisele Mata, an organizer with the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, a statewide organizing group that played a key role in the national campaign, at the press conference.

In June 2015, the campaign released another report, Do Hedge Funds Make Good Neighbors? How Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and HUD are Selling Off Our Neighborhoods to Wall Street, at a protest rally in front of the Santa Monica office of the Blackstone Group, the private equity giant (with over $300 billion in assets under management), which had become the largest landlord of single-family rentals in the country by gobbling up distressed mortgages - including many sold by HUD — at bargain-basement prices. Since 2012, the report found, federal agencies had sold over 120,000 delinquent mortgages to Wall Street hedge funds and private equities firms. Bayview Acquisitions, largely owned by Blackstone, has bought 24,000 of these mortgages. The report unearthed an array of disturbing business practices, including failure to make repairs and the harassment and illegal eviction of occupants. An investigation by the New York Times published last week confirmed earlier findings of abusive practices. The Times revealed, for example, that Lone Star had pushed thousands of borrowers into foreclosure and failed to negotiate with homeowners to modify their mortgages so they could remain in their homes.

Through Local Progress and 17 progressive mayors from across the county,, the campaign persuaded the U.S. Conference of Mayors to pass resolution asking HUD to change its policy.

Last September, community activists and local elected officials from around the country converged in Washington, D.C. to bring the cause directly to federal officials. After a rally at which Senator Warren and Congressman Michael Capuano (D-Mass) demanded that HUD curb its mortgage sales to Wall Street investors, the activists met with senior officials at HUD and the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. A few weeks later, the New York Times published an editorial, “Foreclosure Abuses, Revisited,” calling on HUD to suspend its sales of distressed mortgages until federal agencies adopt significant reforms.

By March of this year, the campaign had built enough momentum to get 45 members of Congress to send a letter to HUD and FHFA in support of the campaign’s demands.

In April, Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Arizona) wrote to Castro - by then on many lists of potential vice presidential candidates - criticizing HUD for worsening the housing crisis with its favorable treatment of Wall Street investors and urging him to “end to the days of casino-level gambling with other peoples’ livelihoods.” That same month, the campaign sent Castro a petition with over 100,000 signatures, demanding that he change HUD’s policies on disposing troubled mortgages.

Along with the changing political climate and Castro’s ambitions, the community organizing groups’ persistence paid off.

With more homes in the hands of non-profits instead of Wall Street speculators, communities will gain further control over their neighborhoods and be less at the mercy of Wall Street. Community groups now plan to work city by city, and state by state, to make sure that HUD sells delinquent mortgage pools to mission-driven purchasers, and to continue the fight for housing justice and community control to strengthen and protect neighborhoods across the country.

By PETER DREIER

Source 

Philly.com - October 15, 2014, by Kia Hinton - Recently, charter schools have made headlines nationwide. This summer, the FBI raided charter schools in Connecticut, Arizona and Ohio. The Annenberg Institute for School Reform released a report on dramatic shortcomings of charter schools, saying "the lack of effective oversight means too many cases of fraud and abuse, too little attention to equity, and no guarantee of academic innovation or excellence."

Pennsylvania has seen its share of charter headlines as well. Earlier this month, ACTION United, the statewide organization I serve on the board of, released a report that uncovered no less than $30 million in fraud by Pennsylvania charter operators since the passage of the 1997 Charter School Act. Philadelphia, which now feeds $800 million a year into charter schools, has simultaneously starved the traditional public school system for years now. Students lack critical services because of the layoffs of nurses, librarians and counselors. Teachers are paying for supplies and even toilet paper out of their own pockets. And after a six year moratorium on charter expansion in Philadelphia, we learned our school district was required to accept a flood of new charter applications as part of the cigarette tax deal.

When I hear about fraudulent charter operators who steal tax dollars from Philadelphia's working families, it's personal.

My family has lived in Southwest Philadelphia for generations, in the same two-story house I grew up in. My youngest child attends Longstreth Elementary, my alma mater. Another of my children attends a Mastery Charter School. All of my children deserve a quality education.

Fraud, waste and mismanagement threaten my children's access to a quality education. Public money is being invested in a massive, fast-growing industry that fundamentally lacks meaningful oversight. Here in Philadelphia, we have just two auditors for 85 charter schools. That lack of oversight enabled people like the founders of Agora Cyber Charter and New Media Technical School to prop up their personal businesses with more than $7 million that was meant for Philadelphia's children.

For these reasons, ACTION United is calling for a statewide moratorium on new charter schools until all charter schools can assure us that they have appropriate fraud-prevention measures in place. We are asking the School Reform Commission to mandate fraud prevention in the charter application process. We are approaching all charter schools to ask them to take our fraud prevention pledge and commit to implementing a fraud risk management program at their nonprofit.

Politicians are making a lot of promises this election season, so here's something they should keep in mind: As long as we continue to lack local control over our own schools in Philadelphia, we expect the governor and the SRC to ensure precious school dollars are spent on our children - not lost to fraud.

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