Trump’s Immigration Policy ‘Fever Dream’
Trump’s Immigration Policy ‘Fever Dream’
“The administration is “creating an environment of profound hostility,” as Ana Maria Archila, the co-executive director...
“The administration is “creating an environment of profound hostility,” as Ana Maria Archila, the co-executive director for the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), told me. (Archila was one of the women who passionately confronted Senator Jeff Flake in an elevator last week during the Senate hearing on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, shortly before the senator urged an FBI investigation into the sexual-assault allegations.) Together with Make the Road New York (MRNY), CPD published an alarming data brief estimating that if the administration were able to effectively implement its “zero-tolerance” policy—its attempt to prosecute all people who cross the border outside of a port of entry—the number of migrants in private detention centers would rocket from between 290 to 580 percent in the next two years.
Read the full article here.
Systemic Fraud Found In GOP-Endorsed Charter Schools
Atlas Left - May 24, 2014, by Josh Kilburn - The House of Representatives recently passed a bill that would grant $3...
Atlas Left - May 24, 2014, by Josh Kilburn - The House of Representatives recently passed a bill that would grant $3 million in taxpayer money to charter schools; schools that both Democrats and Republicans are lining up behind. In the wake of this, Ring of Fire took a critical eye to some of the rampant abuses in the system with guest and Bill Moyers.com senior digital producer, Joshua Hollands, present to help explain what it meant.
While discussing how abused the system is, Joshua Holland referenced a report by Integrity in Education and the Center for Popular Democracy in regards to the systematic abuse and waste in charter schools:
[They found] in fifteen states, just fifteen states they looked at, they found $140 million dollars in public funds that were lost to fraud, waste, and abuse . . . This is all taxpayer money, so, that’s right. What they found, for example, was using public education dollars, these private operators were using them to prop up other businesses. There was an incident where somebody was feeding these public dollars into their health food store. In another instance, there was somebody who was using these dollars to make repairs on their apartment complex that they’d rented out. This again is somewhat unsurprising given that you have such limited oversight.And the reason for that limited oversight? Charter schools try to have it both ways; when it comes to public money, they’re suddenly public institutions. When it comes to public oversight, they change the color of their scales and become private institutions with “proprietary secrets.”
There are other problems as well; charter school teachers are paid less than public school teachers, administrations are paid more, and they’re less likely to be unionized than public school teachers. And that’s the union busing angle: the private sector unionization is at an all time low — only 7%. The majority of unionized workers are in the public sector, which is what the big businesses are targeting in an systematic, widespread anti-union, anti-worker putsch to restore our nation to the gilded glory days of the 1870s and 1880s.
Our public schools are not the problem. In wealthy districts, the public schools are top in the world as far as reading, writing, and other testing goes. It’s only in the poorer districts, where childhood poverty is rampant, that we find the lower numbers pulling down the average. Since “we tolerate a high level of childhood poverty relative to other nations,” in the words of Joshua Holland, and poor children don’t preform as well as their wealthy counterparts do, low test scores should come as no surprise. Out of 35 nations tested, the United States rates 34 in child poverty; the only country below us is Romania. And until we do something about the rampant poverty, instead of blaming it on the teachers, the problem won’t be going away.
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‘Conservatives Cannot Sit Back’: Coalition Wants to Meet With Fed Chair Janet Yellen
The Daily Signal - December 17, 2014, by Kate Scanlon - Federal Reserve chairwoman Janet Yellen met with...
The Daily Signal - December 17, 2014, by Kate Scanlon - Federal Reserve chairwoman Janet Yellen met with several left-leaning groups last month to discuss monetary policy. Now, several conservative organizations are asking for the same opportunity.
Twenty representatives from more than a dozen conservative groups hand-delivered their request to the Federal Reserve last week seeking a meeting with Yellen.
The groups, led by American Principles in Action, include Americans for Tax Reform, the Jack Kemp Foundation and Citizens for Limited Government.
The letter states that “thought leaders from the center-right” deserve the same opportunity because “the left by no means has a monopoly on concern for unemployment and wage stagnation.”
Steve Lonegan, director of monetary policy at American Principles in Action, told The Daily Signal:
Monetary policy is at the root of economic stability, critical for assuring equitable prosperity for all Americans. Conservatives are committed to building a sound economy where everyone, rich and poor, can grow and prosper.
The left has met with Janet Yellen in an effort to influence monetary policy. Conservatives cannot sit back and allow liberals to have sole voice with the Federal Reserve System.
Conservatives have the science, history, facts and philosophy for advancing good money that assures equitable prosperity for all Americans.
In November, Yellen met with representatives from several left-leaning groups, including The Center for Popular Democracy, a group that, according to its website, works with “high-impact base-building organizations, organizing alliances and progressive unions” to advance a “pro-worker, pro-immigrant, racial and economic justice agenda.”
Ady Barkan, an attorney with the center, told the Associated Press that she thought Yellen and other Fed officials “listened.”
“It was a very good conversation,” said Barkan. “They listened very intently, and they asked meaningful follow-up questions.”
According to The Daily Caller, the closed-door meeting was a source of frustration for conservatives because “the press was shut out of the meeting and no transcript made available.”
According to Bloomberg, the Nov. 14 meeting also included Fed governors Stanley Fischer, Jerome Powell and Lael Brainard.
The letter from the conservative groups argues that they deserve a similar meeting because “an evenhanded insight on achieving our shared goal of job creation and economic mobility would facilitate steps toward realization of this mutual objective.”
You can read the full letter here.
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At Swanky Federal Reserve Retreat, “Computer Glitch” Cancels Minority Protesters’ Hotel Reservations
At Swanky Federal Reserve Retreat, “Computer Glitch” Cancels Minority Protesters’ Hotel Reservations
THE KANSAS CITY Federal Reserve’s annual symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, attracts central bankers, economists and...
THE KANSAS CITY Federal Reserve’s annual symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, attracts central bankers, economists and the global elite. The past two years, some new faces came to Jackson Hole: low-wage workers who object to the Fed raising interest rates when too many at the bottom rungs of the economic ladder still struggle.
This year, somebody appears to be ensuring that ordinary people won’t disrupt the party.
The Fed Up campaign, a coalition that brought the workers to Jackson Hole in 2014 and 2015, has filed a formal complaint with the departments of Justice and the Interior, along with the National Park Service, because their hotel reservations for this year’s conference were mysteriously canceled.
Despite paying in advance for spots at the 385-room Jackson Lake Lodge, the Grand Teton Lodge Company told the campaign July 26 that their reservations would not be honored, citing a “computer glitch.” Grand Teton operates the lodge, a publicly owned facility, under a contract with the National Park Service.
Thirty-nine members of the coalition planned to attend this year, but the lodge said computer glitch resulted in overbooking its rooms by 18. Instead of spacing that out among all Jackson Lake lodge guests, the company cancelled all 13 of the Fed Up campaign’s rooms. So nearly three-quarters of the cancelled reservations belonged to the Fed Up group, even though they were told when they booked that 100 rooms were still available at the lodge.
“There is no legitimate explanation for the company’s decision,” wrote Fed Up campaign chair Ady Barkan in the complaint, which alleges possible violations of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the First Amendment right to peaceable assembly. “This is egregious and disparate treatment.”
The coalition’s reservations were made in the names of staffers for three of its member organizations – the Center for Popular Democracy, the Economic Policy Institute, and the Center for Economic and Policy Research – using work email addresses.
In an email statement, Alex Klein, vice president and general manager of Grand Teton Lodge Company, said: “This summer we encountered an error with our booking system that resulted in our Jackson Lake Lodge property being oversold by 18 rooms for three peak nights in August. We worked proactively and diligently with guests to relocate them to our nearby Flagg Ranch property, and offered to keep them on a wait list for available rooms should there be cancellations at the Jackson Lake Lodge. We regret inconveniencing any of our guests.”
The Jackson Hole symposium takes place from August 25-27. The event typically features a highly anticipated speech by the Federal Reserve chair – Janet Yellen is expected this year.
In 2014 and 2015, Fed Up brought unemployed workers and local activists to Jackson Hole to highlight how the economy has left behind communities of color and to urge the Fed to hear their voices. Last year, they held an alternative conference in Jackson Hole lodge conference rooms, featuring economists like Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz.
This year, Fed Up planned to hold a teach-in outside of the lodge, and secured permits for a protest. They still expect 120 members, their largest contingent ever, to attend the proceedings, but they will have to stay in alternative accommodations that are a 20- to 30-minute drive away, separate from symposium guests and the press.
The majority of Fed Up members planning to attend the conference are African-American and Latino, which is why the campaign wants the Justice Department to investigate the matter as a violation of laws ensuring nondiscriminatory treatment in public accommodations. They also want to know if the Kansas City Federal Reserve was at all involved with the decision.
Kansas City Federal Reserve President Esther George has consistently drawn criticism from the Fed Up coalition for wanting to raise interest rates and slow down the economy.
The lodge’s general manager told Fed Up that their reservations were pulled because they were booked in a group of 13, making it easier to cancel them. This, the campaign believes, also violates First Amendment rights to freedom of assembly.
“I recognize that our presence is not desired by either the company or the organizers of the symposium,” Barkan wrote. “But the physical and virtual segregation of Federal Reserve decision-makers far away from the voices and opinions of working class people of color is precisely what the Fed Up coalition is trying to dismantle.”
The incident comes at a sensitive time for the Federal Reserve, which has already been criticized by 127 members of Congress for a lack of diversity among its leadership, which is disproportionately white, male, and either current or former executives of large corporations and financial institutions. Activists believe this homogeneity in race, gender, and background drives central bank decisions that cater to the wealthy and neglect communities of color.
Barkan’s letter to Justice and the Interior concludes: “Once again, the voices and faces of working class people of color have been marginalized … and an opaque, inaccessible, and incredibly powerful quasi-governmental institution has received a bit more insulation from the opinions of the people over whose lives it has so much power.”
The Intercept has reached out for comment to the Justice Department, the Interior Department, and the National Park Service, but did not immediately hear back.
Top photo: National Park Rangers stand silhouetted inside the lobby of Jackson Lake Lodge during the Jackson Hole economic symposium in August 2015.
By David Dayen
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America’s Massive Retail Workforce Is Tired of Being Ignored
America’s Massive Retail Workforce Is Tired of Being Ignored
Francisco Aguilera has worked at the Express on Bay Street in Emeryville, California for the past year and a half. “I...
Francisco Aguilera has worked at the Express on Bay Street in Emeryville, California for the past year and a half. “I do a little bit of everything,” from running the register to folding and arranging clothes to working in the stockroom in the back of the store, he says. Soft-spoken with an open smile, Aguilera is what many people picture to be the typical retail worker: someone putting in a few hours in the evenings at a shopping complex while attending college during the day. He likes his job well enough, though he notes it can be tiring to work until 9:30 or 10:00 at night and then find time to do his schoolwork.
Read the full article here.
Nearly 2,500 Bridges to Nowhere: Congress Considers Expanding Charter Program Despite Millions Wasted on Closed Schools
UPDATE July 15th -- Earlier this week, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) invoked cloture on the ESEA bill,...
UPDATE July 15th -- Earlier this week, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) invoked cloture on the ESEA bill, which contains provisions to expand the Charter Schools Program. The final vote will be held today. McConnell's move to bring matters to a close came as a surprise to the authors of the bill who had expected a more robust debate, and, as EdWeek reports, "especially squeezes Democrats who are still working on proposals to beef up accountability."
As both the House and the Senate consider separate bills that would reauthorize and expand the quarter-billion-dollar-a-year Charter Schools Program (CSP), the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has examined more than a decade of data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) as well as documentation from open records requests. The results are troubling.
Between 2001 and 2013, 2,486 charter schools have been forced to shutter, affecting 288,000 American children enrolled in primary and secondary schools.
Furthermore, untold millions out of the $3.3 billion expended by the federal government under CSP have been awarded as planning and implementation grants to schools that never opened to students.
Charters Much More Likely to Close
The failure rate for charter schools is much higher than for traditional public schools. In the 2011-2012 school year, for example, charter school students ran two and half times the risk of having their education disrupted by a school closing and suffering academic setbacks as a result. Dislocated students are less likely to graduate and suffer other harms.
In a 2014 study, Matthew F. Larsen with the Department of Economics at Tulane University looked at high school closures in Milwaukee, almost all of which were charter schools. He concluded that closures decreased “high school graduation rates by nearly 10%" The effects persist "even if the students attends a better quality school after closure.”
Hidden behind the statistics are the social consequences. According to a 2013 paper by Robert Scott and Miguel Saucedo at the University of Illinois. They found that school closures “have exacerbated inter-neighborhood tensions among Chicago youth in recent years” and have been a contributing factor to the high rate of youth incarceration.
Because the U.S. Department of Education does not provide the public with any accounting for the amount of taxpayer money—whether state or federal—that has been spent on these failed charter schools, there is no way to estimate the total amount of money missing in action. However, the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) recently estimated that "according to standard forensic auditing methodologies, the deficiencies in charter oversight throughout the country suggest that federal, state and local government stand to lose more than $1.4 billion in 2015."
Major Probes into Closed Charters Underway
According to a PowerPoint presentation CMD has uncovered, the watchdogs at the U.S. Department of Education's Office of the Inspector General are currently conducting major nationwide probes into the lack of accountability and oversight within the Charter School Program. One of these audits focuses on where federal grants end up when charter schools are forced to close. A spokesperson for OIG confirmed to CMD that these investigations are ongoing.
The new probes come in the wake of a scathing 2012 audit, which exposed an utter lack of financial controls in the case of money awarded to charters that later closed. “The school files had no follow-up documentation for any of the 12 closed schools reviewed,” the OIG noted in the case of California. The U.S. Department of Education had conducted no oversight and failed to ensure that states receiving tens or hundreds of millions in grants had “procedures to properly account for SEA grant funds spent by closed charter schools.”
Meanwhile, U.S. Department of Education officials have assured stakeholders that the problems with millions disappearing down black holes are now a thing of the past. But the fact that the OIG has found reason to launch major investigations this year tells a different story.
Federal Millions Missing in Action as Charter Close or Never Open
It is impossible to anticipate the findings of the ongoing OIG probes, but even a cursory review of federal charter school grants in Wisconsin and Indiana, conducted by CMD, uncovered dozens of schools that were created out of seed money under the program but later forced to shutter because of financial mismanagement, failure to educate students or lack of enrollment.
Wisconsin received $69.6 million between 2010 and 2015, but out of the charters awarded sub-grants during the first two years of the cycle, one-fifth (16 out of 85) have closed since.
Indiana was awarded $31.3 million under the Charter Schools Program between 2010 and 2015. One of the reasons the state landed the grant, the reviewers contracted by the U.S. Department of Education to score the application make clear, was that charter schools in the state are exempt from democratic oversight by elected school boards. “[C]harter schools are accountable solely to authorizers under Indiana law,” one reader enthuses, awarding the application 30/30 on the rubric “flexibility offered by state law.” This “flexibility,” which the federal program is designed to promote, has been a recipe for disaster:
The Indiana Cyber Charter School opened in 2012 with $420,000 in seed money from the federal program. Dogged by financial scandals and plummeting student results the charter was revoked in 2015 and the school last month leaving 1,100 students in the lurch.
Padua Academy lost its charter in 2014 and converted to a private religious school, but not before receiving $702,000 in federal seed money.
Via Charter School was awarded $193,000 in a “planning grant” but never opened.
Early Career Academy landed a $193,000 planning grant and was due to open last year. This has been postponed because of “governance issues,” according to the school. The charter is sponsored by a for-profit college—ITT Tech—that is currently being sued by federal government for coercing students into taking out student loans for college credits that do not transfer.
In April 2015, Education Secretary Arne Duncan testified in front of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health & Human Services and Education on abuse of federal funding by for-profit colleges, such as ITT Tech, that were “taking advantage of a massive influx of taxpayer resources.”
“The findings that we are putting forward are pretty stunning…pretty egregious. The waste of taxpayer money—none of us can feel good about,” said Duncan.
And yet, he is calling for a 48 percent expansion of the charter schools program—a program that will likely be up for the vote in the House and Senate this week, before the results of any of the OIG audits are made public to lawmakers and stakeholders.
CMD will soon be releasing the full dataset, as well as information on the methodology used to arrive at the list of closed schools, to help reporters and public school advocates tell the story.
Source: PR Watch
Voices: A middle ground in the immigration debate
MIAMI — Not that long ago, part of my morning routine involved catching up on what states around the country were doing...
MIAMI — Not that long ago, part of my morning routine involved catching up on what states around the country were doing that day to crack down on illegal immigration.
That habit started in 2010, when Arizona passed a law empowering state police to enforce immigration laws. One by one, other states started following suit. Utah. Indiana. South Carolina. Alabama wanted to check the immigration status of children enrolling in its public schools. Georgia was so successful driving undocumented immigrants out of the state that it turned to prison labor to harvest its abandoned crops, a plan that quickly failed once the prisoners started walking off the job.
Then, something changed. Those laws started getting struck down in courts. Others states halted their efforts to pass Arizona copycat bills. And before I knew it, I was drinking my morning glass of orange juice while reading through articles about local efforts to make life easier for undocumented immigrants.
The most interesting of those efforts has been a push to provide local identification cards to undocumented immigrants. The idea is simple: A city or county creates a "municipal ID" that those immigrants can use to interact with city officials, identify themselves to police officers and even open bank accounts so they're not easy, cash-carrying targets for would-be robbers. The IDs aren't substitutes for driver's licenses or federally-accepted forms of ID — for example, you can't get through security at an airport or board a flight with one.
The number of places approving those IDs has surged in recent months, with Hartford, Ct., Newark, N.J., Greensboro, N.C., and New York City approving them.
The wave of cities adopting municipal IDs doesn't mean the country has suddenly turned completely immigrant-friendly. Just tune in to the next Republican presidential debate to see how many candidates are proposing mass deportations, cutting down on legal immigration channels and missile-firing drone patrols along the southwest border. Or watch as states try to crack down on sanctuary city policies within their borders.
But what the cities adopting municipal IDs show is that there may be a middle ground in the immigration debate that has been so incredibly polarized in recent years. On the one side, we had states like Arizona passing laws to go after undocumented immigrants. On the other, we had cities and counties like San Francisco adopting "sanctuary city" policies that have allowed some undocumented immigrants with violent, criminal backgrounds to walk free.
The reason we've seen that pendulum swing so wildly in opposite directions is that Congress and the White House have been unable to come together and fix our nation's broken immigration system. That's why millions of undocumented immigrants continue pouring over our southwest border. That's why millions of legal immigrants can stay in the country long past the time their visas have expired. And that's why Americans can continue hiring those undocumented immigrants with little fear of punishment.
What's left is a system that has effectively allowed 11 million undocumented immigrants to stay in the country. And whoever you blame for that, they've been left in a legal limbo that makes life incredibly difficult for them.
Take Rosana Araújo, an Uruguayan who visited Miami on a three-month visa 13 years ago and never went back. Araújo has spent her years here cleaning houses, warehouses, day care centers, whatever she could do to get by. But the 47-year-old said the fact that her only form of identification is her Uruguayan passport has made her life difficult in so many ways.
She can't use a public library. She can't get past the security desk of local hospitals to visit sick relatives or friends. She said she couldn't even return a pair of pants atWalmart because they insisted on a Florida ID card.
Most important, Araújo said she didn't call police after she was sexually assaulted in 2009 because she had heard from other undocumented immigrants who had been victims of sexual violence that they were caught up in immigration proceedings after reporting the crime.
"The first thing they do is ask for your identification. And the passport for them isn't valid," she said. "That makes you far more vulnerable that the police are going to pick you up for not having identification."
Now Araújo is helping several groups push government agencies in Miami-Dade County to adopt the municipal IDs. The Center for Popular Democracy, a group that advocates for immigrant rights, estimates that two dozen other cities, including Phoenix, New Orleans and Milwaukee, are now considering adopting the program
Municipal IDs won't solve our nation's immigration problem. But they just might be the best short-term solution to ensure undocumented immigrants aren't completely helpless as we all wait for Washington to find a solution.
The Real Threat to the Fed’s Independence Is Wall Street, Not Trump
The Real Threat to the Fed’s Independence Is Wall Street, Not Trump
“But the real threat to the Fed’s independence isn’t coming from Trump—it’s coming from Wall Street. The Fed’s...
“But the real threat to the Fed’s independence isn’t coming from Trump—it’s coming from Wall Street. The Fed’s structural flaws have led to regulatory capture, which compromises its ability to set monetary and regulatory policy in a manner that isn’t tilted to favor those at the very top of the economic ladder. Trump may have broken a norm by commenting on monetary policy, but the Fed’s status quo is unaccountable, opaque decision-making shaped by deep conflicts of interest with the very financial institutions the Fed is ostensibly supposed to supervise.
Read the full article here.
Banks on the Run (Continued)
The Nation - April 30, 2013 - You can’t talk about poverty without talking about the practices of the big banks,...
The Nation - April 30, 2013 - You can’t talk about poverty without talking about the practices of the big banks, including their continuing refusal to stem the foreclosure crisis through mortgage principal reductions.
Consider this: Latinos lost 66 percent of their household wealth after the housing bubble burst, and African-American households lost 53 percent. Nearly 12 million families—disproportionately people of color—have either lost their homes or are currently in foreclosure, and another 16 million are underwater, owing more on their mortgages than their homes are worth.
Communities are decimated by boarded up houses and vacant lots, declining property values and the consequent loss of state and local revenues, and fewer opportunities to weather and recover from financial hardship. A new study from the Urban Institute indicates that white families now average six times the wealth of African-American and Latino families.
So when US Bank executives fled Minneapolis two weeks ago to hold their annual shareholders meeting in what they believed would be friendlier confines in Boise, it was important that activists from Minnesota and Oregon traveled to join Idahoans in an effort to hold the bank accountable. Then last week, Wells Fargo bankers traveled from San Francisco to Salt Lake City for their shareholders meeting, and activists again weren’t deterred—they came from California, Colorado and New York to stand with local groups and protest the bank’s practices.
“Wells Fargo moved the shareholders meeting to Salt Lake because last year there were 3,000 people in the streets in San Francisco,” said Maurice Weeks, campaign coordinator for the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), which had fifteen members make the eleven-hour trip to Utah. “We wanted them to know that they can’t hide from us.”
ACCE members attended the shareholders meeting as legal proxies. They were joined by members of the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project (NEDAP) from New York, the Colorado Student Power Alliance and local groups from Salt Lake City that were focused on Wells Fargo’s investments in private prisons and the impact on communities of color.
Several ACCE members in attendance were facing immediate foreclosures and welcomed the opportunity to tell Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf—who was paid $22.87 million last year, more than any other banker—that they hadn’t been given a fair shake.
“We’re talking about folks who could pay their mortgages and stay in their houses with a modification, and Wells refuses,” said Weeks. “We’ve had situations where a HUD counselor tells our members that they qualify and Wells still denies a modification.”
More broadly, ACCE was there to demand that Wells commit to pursuing principal reductions—reducing the amount owed on a mortgage so that it reflects the fair market value of the property—wherever they are legally able to do so. A recent report from ACCE, the Center for Popular Democracy and the Home Defenders League suggests that foreclosing on the more than 11,600 California homes currently in Wells’s foreclosure pipeline—which are concentrated in poor and non-white communities—would cost the state approximately $3.3 billion due to the decreased value of the foreclosed properties, decreased value of homes in the surrounding communities and lost tax revenues. In contrast, a comprehensive program of principal reduction would stabilize households, increase tax revenues and boost the economic vitality of distressed communities. (Modifications also happen to be better for the investors who hold the mortgage, but unfortunately banks that service the mortgages—like Wells Fargo—can often make more money by foreclosing.)
A second key demand by ACCE members was that Wells Fargo report its data on principal reductions, short sales and foreclosures by race, income and zip code. Last year, the bank reached a $175 million settlement with the Department of Justice for allegedly charging African-American and Latino borrowers higher rates and fees and steering them into subprime loans when they should have qualified for regular loans.
“Our members want to make sure Wells isn’t still preying on communities of color,” said Weeks.
NEDAC presented a resolution for an independent investigation of Wells Fargo’s business practices in order to ensure that they don’t violate any fair lending or fair mortgage laws. Although the resolution was voted down, Weeks said it received more discussion than any other resolution presented to the shareholders.
“ACCE members—but also people we didn’t know—were all voicing concerns about Wells Fargo’s mortgage practices,” said Weeks.
According to Weeks, when Stumpf tried to move onto “business as usual,” Makayla Major, an ACCE member from East Oakland, stood up and shouted, “John Stumpf, you’re a liar and a crook. You are stealing too many homes in my neighborhood!” Weeks said that the room was lined with “forty or fifty” security guards and that “six or seven” immediately moved in to “make her be quiet.”
Then ACCE member Manuela Alvarez—who has been trying unsuccessfully to modify her subprime loan since her husband was injured on the job—said, “You are trying to steal my home, like you’ve stolen the homes of tens of thousands of other hard-working families. It’s time for you to be held accountable!”
She, too, was quickly surrounded by security.
ACCE member Melvin Willis then began reading a “Citizens Arrest Warrant” for Stumpf for “the following crimes: illegally foreclosing on millions of homeowners nationwide; intentionally targeting communities of color with predatory, high-cost loans; and gouging students with predatory student loans—usury.”
“He was immediately swarmed and at that point we were all escorted out of the room and the hotel,” said Weeks. “But John Stumpf and the shareholders definitely heard our message, and we made it clear that they can’t ignore these issues.”
Wells Fargo made $19 billion in profits last year and record profits last quarter. None of this would have been possible without the bank bailout and continued borrowing of taxpayer money at zero percent interest from the Federal Reserve (which Wells Fargo and the other big banks then turn around and loan to state and local governments at much higher rates).
ACCE and its allies showed up in Salt Lake City to take a stand against a wealth-stripping machine. There will be more actions ahead against Bank of America (May 9), Sallie Mae (May 30) and Walmart (June 7). Sign up to stay informed here.
“The message from the banks is that the foreclosure crisis is over, and a lot of the general public is hearing that,” said Weeks. “But we see on the ground that that’s far from true, and that Wells Fargo continues to profit at the expense of our communities. That’s why we’re keeping up the pressure of this campaign. We’re going to fight for our communities as hard as we possibly can.”
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Ciudades Invierten Para Que Más Inmigrantes se Hagan Ciudadanos
Vivelo Hoy - September 17, 2014, by Jaime Reyes - Chicago se unió a las ciudades de los Angeles y Nueva York en el...
Vivelo Hoy - September 17, 2014, by Jaime Reyes - Chicago se unió a las ciudades de los Angeles y Nueva York en el programa “Cities for Citizenship” para que más inmigrantes legales se hagan ciudadanos.
El programa, que además ayudará a inmigrantes con micropréstamos, servicios financieros y legales, será financiado por la corporación Citigroup, con más de $1 millón, y será coordinado por las organizaciones no lucrativas Center for Popular Democracy y National Partnership for New Americans.
Según un comunicado del municipio de Chicago, en Estados Unidos hay más de 8.8 millones de residentes legales, quienes son elegibles para ser ciudadanos.
“Los inmigrantes que se naturalizan hacen grandes contribuciones a nuestras comunidades, ciudades y país y nos conviene colectivamente promover la ciudadanía”, indicó el alcalde de Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, junto a los alcaldes Eric Garcetti, de los Angeles y Bill de Blasio, de Nueva York
Para leer más de nuestra cobertura sobre inmigrantes, visite este enlace.
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2 days ago
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