CPD IN THE NEWS

We’re in the thick of the second post-Citizens United presidential campaign, and it’s already clear that allowing unlimited funds to influence political elections was a terrible idea. 

Half of the funds supporting presidential candidates from both parties comes from a mere 158 families — a miniscule percentage of America’s 120 million households — as documented by a recent New York Times investigation. Largely white, older, male, and Republican, they are also unrepresentative of what our multicultural society looks like.

As a result of this narrow group of donors controlling what’s on the political agenda, America has a fundamentally undemocratic system in which working class people and people of color are left on the margins, silenced in a political debate, they can’t gain access to — because they don’t have millions to share.

America has become a tyranny of the few, and Americans are fed up with the broken system. Last week, voters in Maine elected to increase funding from $2 million to $3 million for the Clean Elections Fund, which provides government grants to candidates who agree to limit their spending and private fundraising. It might be a long time before Citizens United is overturned. In the interim, it’s important that other states introduce similar legislation challenging existing financing models.

The tyranny of the few is two-pronged, however. Not only are our elected leaders being held accountable to wealthy donors instead of the people of our nation, the least privileged of this nation are simultaneously facing strong barriers to voting. 

Our antiquated voter registration system results in roughly 62 million eligible voters not registered, either because they never registered or their registration information is incorrect. In a 2008 Current Population Survey, blacks and Latinos cited “difficulties with the registration process” as their main reason for not registering to vote. Whites disproportionately reported not registering because they were “not interested in elections or politics.” Barriers to voting registration are in many states especially well in place for people of color, workers and youth, who are targeted by voter suppression laws.

We could put an end to the error-ridden old-fashioned manual voter registration and step into the 21st century with automatic voter registration. Other states could follow the example set by California and Oregon, which are linking voter registration to the Department of Motor Vehicles. Through linking voter registration with public offices such as the DMV, revenue agencies, the Postal Service and others, the United States could secure over 56 million more voters, as a report from Center for Popular Democracy shows. 

So to sum up: people of color and working class Americans aren’t just unable to place millions of dollars with politicians who will take care of them in Congress, they aren’t even able to vote for leaders who might serve their interests.

The outcome? Our America has become an oligarchy run by a tiny and overly privileged section of its population, whose lives and wishes for our nation are in stark opposition to the lives and dreams of the average American. 

This is borne out in our legislation. Despite overwhelming public support for policies such as taxing those who earn more than $1 million a year, and laws that address inequality, workers’ rights, and protection of the middle class, we see the footprints of corporate powers all over our legislation. 

We need to act fast by passing laws that disrupt this undemocratic cycle. We must break Congress’ dependency on big money and return the power to the people, but we can’t only rely on our lawmakers to change our nation. 

It will take a lot of work, but we can’t allow for this undemocratic oligarchy to go on. Let’s not leave the future of our country in the hands of the wealthiest, let’s instead bring back democracy to our nation.

Source: Common Dreams

The Federal Reserve is a hot topic in the news these days. Usually, the stories revolve around the merits of its decisions: Was quantitative easing a good idea? Should it raise interest rates again in April? But Andrew Levin, a Dartmouth economist and former aide to Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, thinks our questions need to go much deeper.

On Monday, Levin and the activist campaign Fed Up proposed four major reforms that would radically alter the structure of the Federal Reserve. The reason they cite is compellingly simple: How the Fed works is basically out of whack with what it does today.

The Federal Reserve began around a century ago as a decentralized and private institution aimed at avoiding financial panics and making sure the interactions between the nation's for-profit banks remained stable. Since then, it's basically become a kind of government agency, with a fundamental role in shaping the American economy and the supply of wages and jobs for everyday workers. But the design and governance of the Fed has not kept up with that shift in responsibilities.

To understand why, let's start at the very beginning. Western economies began creating central banks several centuries ago as modern capitalism was first coming into focus, to serve as a "lender of last resort." Private banks could go and borrow from the central bank when times were tight — even if was just for a few days — and that would quell potential financial panics and bank runs. As a result, central banks were generally created by government charters, but as private corporations whose shares were owned by the banks that borrowed from them. "When the Bank of England and some other major central banks were founded, they were viewed as mostly providing services to commercial banks," as Levin explained to The Week.

America's Federal Reserve was created in 1913 under very similar circumstances. A potential financial crisis in 1907 was averted only when J.P. Morgan stepped in to backstop the country's private banks with his own personal fortune. No one wanted a repeat of that, so the Fed was created. It's actually a system of 12 regions, each overseen by a Fed branch bank — there's one in Dallas, in Richmond, in New York City, and so forth — with the private banks owning the shares of whatever Fed bank oversees their region.

More importantly, each regional Fed bank is run by a board of nine directors, six of whom are appointed by the private banking industry. The other three are appointed by the Federal Reserve system's national Board of Governors — a seven-member group appointed by the U.S. president and confirmed by the Senate. Together, the directors appoint a president to run their particular regional bank, rather like a CEO and a corporate board: They set the president's salary, review his or her performance, etc. All nine used to do that, but Dodd-Frank reformed the system in 2010 so that three of the six governors appointed by the private banks no longer play a role in selecting the president.

Over the course of the 20th Century, various developments like the end of the gold standard and the creation of federal deposit insurance diluted the importance of the regional banks as lenders of last resort. At the same time, however, the regional banks found themselves owning large amounts of financial instruments as a result of serving that role. So they created a joint national group to manage all those holdings called the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), and over time it grew in importance. Its decisions are determined by 12 votes: the seven members of the Board of Governors, plus five of the 12 regional presidents. (The 12 presidents rotate through the voting positions, while the other seven sit in on the FOMC but don't vote.)

Today, when we talk about the Fed setting interest rates or meeting to decide monetary policy — which in turn decides the rate of wage growth and the supply of jobs throughout the entire national economy — we're talking about the FOMC. "For all practical purposes, the Federal Reserve today is a public enterprise," Levin said. "It's serving the public. It's making nationally critical decisions."

The problem is the Federal Reserve system was originally conceived of and designed as an add-on to the private banking industry, and that design has remained even as the nature and responsibilities of the Fed have change enormously: "This whole rationale that made perfect sense in 1913 doesn't make sense anymore," Levin said. The result is an institution that, while of enormous import to the public good, is incredibly complex, opaque, and governed with comparatively little input from everyday Americans.

"The Fed, in order to be effective, has to have the confidence of the public," Levin said. But allowing the banks to hold such enormous sway over the decision-making of the institution tasked with both setting national interest rates and regulating the financial system undermines that confidence. Economist Dean Baker analogized it to "reserving seats on the Federal Communications Commission’s board for the cable television industry." Levin himself likened it to allowing criminal attorneys or defense lawyers to select the director of the FBI and set his or her salary and performance review.

So Levin has put forward four major reforms. They're broad, and the details for how they could play out are negotiable, but they're aimed at starting a conversation around the topic.

One is to eliminate private ownership of shares in the Federal Reserve system and make it fully public, but more importantly to completely reform how the nine directors of each regional bank are appointed. This could involve reducing the number of directors, but mostly it would involve selecting them all via the same process, one that brings in all aspects of the community — small businesses, community groups, unions, non-profits, etc. In particular, directors should not come from institutions — i.e. private banks and financial entities — that the Fed system is tasked with overseeing.

The next step would be to make the process by which the nine directors for each region select their president public and transparent. As Ady Barkan, the campaign director for Fed Up, pointed out in a press call, when all 12 regional president slots were up for replacement in February, all 12 were quietly and opaquely re-appointed — even after the Fed Up campaign pressed Fed officials to lay out a system by which the public could participate. The ones for Dallas, Minneapolis, and Philadelphia were all previously associated with Goldman Sachs. St. Louis Federal Reserve President James Bullard once told Barkan that, "To call the reappointment process pro forma would be an understatement."

Third would be to set term limits for Fed officials. Make them long enough to insulate those officials from political pressure. But don't allow them to serve multiple terms one after the other as they can now.

And finally, apply the same transparency standards to the Fed that are applied to other government agencies: Allow the Government Accountability Office to publish an annual review of all the Fed's operations and policies, and make sure both the Fed's Inspector General and the Freedom of Information Act apply to the 12 regional banks as well as the national Board of Governors.

"What I've proposed is something that seems incremental, workable, and helpful," Levin concluded. And despite arguments over whether the Fed is making the right choices in the here and now about things like interest rates, Levin's goal is much bigger: to make the Fed a healthy functioning member of our democracy long after the current economic situation — and whatever particular monetary policy stance it calls for — has passed.

"These reforms are to improve governance, accountability and transparency," Levin said. "We live in a democracy — and the government is supposed to serve the public."

By Jeff Spross

Source

Brooklyn City Councilman Brad Lander is advertising for a communications director who, in addition to fulfilling the standard checklist of duties, can also help the Democrat “resist the injustice, hatred, and corruption posed by the Trump regime.”

In an unusual listing that has been posted to several job boards, including Idealist, Lander is looking for a staffer to see beyond New York City, and to keep an eye on the actions of President-elect Donald Trump.

The ideal candidate  should be able to implement Lander's communications and media program while also defending against what the councilman calls the threat "to American democratic values and vulnerable constituencies." The goal, according to the ad, is to help "build a more just, inclusive, and sustainable NYC.”

A minimum of three to four years of communications experience — ideally in New York City — is required for the job, as is a sense of humor, according to the listing. The job includes a “competitive salary,” which was not specified but reported to be in the range of $61,000 to $67,000 a year, according to the New York Daily News.

Lander, an outspoken councilmember who was once arrested for blocking traffic to support striking car washers in Park Slope, is co-founder of the Council’s progressive caucus. He is also incoming board chairman of Local Progress, a nationwide network of self-described progressive local officials.

By Alexi Friedman

Source

After reading about Gov. Walker’s plan to close some Green Bay public schools and replace them with charters, I’m beginning to believe the takeover of our public schools by big business and legislators like Walker is proceeding very well.

They say our public schools are failing. That’s not fully true. Some are, but it’s because of poverty. We don’t fund them adequately to overcome student poverty-related problems.

No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and Common Core were composed and implemented by Bill Gates and other member of the 1 percent without input from parents, teachers of early childhood students and early education experts.

The educational expectations, of especially very young children, are causing children great stress, enough to make them throw up, cry and get sick. The standardized testing by Pearson (a British multinational corporation) is a hoax. It has no background in education or teaching children. Its record of mistakes in the test questions, correcting tests, and delivering them on time is dismal.

I remember in the ’70s standardized testing was dropped all over the country because the tests were considered an inaccurate method of measuring the whole learning process. They basically measure memorization. Now they’re back and they’re quick, inaccurate and expensive.

The complaint of parents, teachers, children and administrators are growing louder because of excessive homework. Health care professionals are saying the stress of overburdening students causing sleeping problems is unhealthy. The curriculum being used now relies on demand-and-push as a method of teaching. I call it abusive because that method doesn’t respect the personhood of the student who becomes a yes person, not a creator.

In my teaching experience, I found children love to learn if they are presented with material they are mentally, physically and developmentally ready for.

We had a school in De Pere called the Wisconsin International School. It left with very little notice to parents and children. Teachers were out paychecks. A friend lost nearly $1,000 she paid as a retainer fee for the next year. They are suing but to little avail.

A year ago, the Center for Popular Democracy issued a report demonstrating “charter schools in 15 states ... had experienced over $100 million in reported fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement. Now there are millions of new alleged and confirmed cases of financial waste, fraud, and mismanagement reported.”

But we don’t yet have the necessary law to protect us from dishonesty in charter schools. How come?

Sen. Dave Hansen said, “Wisconsin taxpayers cannot afford to pay for two systems, much less a system of private schools that are not held accountable for providing their students quality education.”

We need our public schools to care for all our students. Finland, a world leader in education, manages it with great success.

Peggy Burns of Green Bay has a bachelor’s degree in kindergarten-primary education, a master’s degree in elementary eduction and 24 graduate credits in early childhood/educational exceptional needs.

Source: Green Bay Press Gazette