CPD IN THE NEWS

As hundreds of undocumented immigrants were rounded up across the country last February in the first mass raids of the Trump administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials went out of their way to portray the people they detained as hardened criminals, instructing field offices to highlight the worst cases for the media and attempting to distract attention from the dozens of individuals who were apprehended despite having no criminal background at all.

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NEW YORK—A group of activists lobbying the Federal Reserve to hold off on raising interest rates is pressing its campaign amid signs from the central bank that it is moving closer to lifting borrowing costs.

Members of the Fed Up Coalition, a left-leaning organization affiliated with the Center for Popular Democracy and connected with labor unions and community groups, met with Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen and other central bank governors late last year.

They recently have met with the leaders of the Boston, Kansas City and San Francisco Fed banks, and are scheduled to meet next with Atlanta Fed President Dennis Lockharton Aug. 12 and with New York Fed President William Dudley on Aug. 14.

Most Fed officials, including Ms. Yellen, have indicated they expect to start raising short-term interest rates this year if the economy keeps improving. They have held their benchmark rate near zero since December 2008 to bolster the economy.

The activists say they want the Fed to hold off a bit longer to ensure the expansion benefits all Americans, not just the wealthiest.

They also want the Fed to become more open about its actions and how it selects the presidents of the 12 regional reserve banks.

And they want the Fed to engage with banks to promote affordable housing.

“Over the last few weeks we’ve had a lot of success engaging with Fed officials,” said Ady Barkan, who leads the Center for Popular Democracy Fed campaign. His group is “seeing that [Fed officials] are really being responsive” to the case they are making, he said.

Mr. Barkan said a recent meeting with St. Louis Fed President James Bullard was particularly fruitful. Mr. Bullard said in an interview with the Journal Friday the Fed has a balancing act when it comes to setting interest rate policy.

He favors raising interest rates this year and says the central bank’s September meeting is likely a good time to start.

“I think I have the better policy for the type of people they want to help,” Mr. Bullard said. “If you go for too much in monetary policy you can get some sort of financial bubbles and imbalances that fall apart and cause a recession,” and modest rate rises soon will help reduce those risks.

The activist group also is calling for greater representation on regional banks’ boards of directors for noncorporate interests. By law, the regional Fed directors are drawn from a mix of financial industry professionals, community and business leaders. Each board oversees individual reserve bank operations, and the directors from outside the financial sector manage the selection of new reserve bank presidents.

Mr. Barkan said Fed boards are dominated by the perspectives of leaders from large institutions. While he welcomes union and nonprofit representation on the boards, Mr. Barkan said the diversity should extend further and include a more ground-level perspective on how the economy is functioning.

Jean-Andre Sassine, age 48, of New York City, plans to attend the group’s meeting with Mr. Dudley. Mr. Sassine, who said he works on television and advertising productions, became interested in the Fed when his family ran into difficulties during the recession. He said that led him to ask questions about the role the central bank was playing to help everyday people.

When he went with the group to the meeting with Ms. Yellen, Mr. Sassine said he walked away with “the sense they aren’t used to dealing with people. It seems like they just get reports” and work off that data, and little else, to make their decisions, Mr. Sassine said.

“We are supposed to have input and recognition and we don’t have it,” Mr. Sassine said. “It can’t all be corporate heads and bankers…We’ve got to have real people who buy groceries” on the Fed’s various advisory boards, he said.

The Fed has tried to broaden its public outreach in recent years. The central bank this year has been recruiting people to serve on a new Community Advisory Council, which will meet twice a year with Washington-based Fed governors. Ms. Yellen last year visited a job-training program in Chicago and a nonprofit in Chelsea, Mass., that helps unemployed people find work.

Mr. Dudley has conducted a number of public tours of the New York Fed’s district, in which he has met with business leaders, academics, community groups and others. In a Wall Street Journal interview in March 2014 he explained he had been using the tours to make the Fed seem less abstract. And he also said the visits had in particular deepened his understanding of the housing crisis and sharpened his response to those troubles.

Staff at the regional Fed banks who have met with the activists say their meetings are part of regular efforts to engage with their communities, and can offer valuable insight into the state of the economy.

In a statement, the Atlanta Fed said it regularly meets with community based interest groups “through its various outreach programs including community and economic development, economic education, and supervision and regulation.”

Source: The Wall Street Journal

In June 2010 I made a very bad tweet that I came to regret. (Hard to imagine, I know.) I yelled at the disability rights group Adapt.

I’d come to DC to attend a conference of progressive leaders, “America’s Future Now.” And while I knew a lot about financial reform, I didn’t know enough about politics, activism, or the Democratic Party.

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ThinkProgress - April 9, 2015, by Alan Pyke - The newest line of criticism for the banking industry is coming from within, as a group of rank-and-file banking employees prepare to demand that their employer stop ordering them to use predatory sales tactics and start treating them as a valued piece of the workforce.

A group of tellers, loan officers, and customer service representatives from the country’s largest commercial banks will rally Monday outside office towers in Minneapolis to call attention to their own low pay and to consumer-harming sales policies they say are imposed on them by management. As part of the demonstrations, workers will ask to meet with executives at Wells Fargo to deliver a petition calling for the bank to do away with high-pressure sales quotas for its customer service staff.

In a new report from the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), one teller “says she has to ‘practically chase customers out of the door hawking unwanted credit and debit card accounts'” or face reproach from her manager, despite corporate policy that ostensibly prohibits disingenuous or high-pressure tales tactics.

“What they want, what they need, isn’t important to us. Selling them a product is,” a call-center worker at another bank said, summarizing the approach her managers take toward customers.

The CPD report details how the largest banks exacerbate inequality on the macro level and prey upon trusting customers on the micro-level. It argues that the largest American consumer banks are contributing to economic inequality and mining huge profits while freezing tens of millions of un-banked Americans out of basic financial services.

The kinds of basic banking products that are essential to working people trying to save for their retirement or their children “are what industry insiders consider ‘low-value’ or ‘low-margin’ services,” CPD notes, and “are not currently a priority for the big banks.” Instead, banks have put tellers and call center employees under ever more pressure to sell people credit cards and additional bank accounts regardless of whether those products suit the customer’s real needs. At one bank, customer service staff must “make 40 percent of the sales of the top seller to avoid being written up.”

For providing this warped version of “customer service” and surviving the high-pressure work environment the banks create for them, frontline workers are rewarded with falling pay. Pay for tellers fell by more than 5 percent from 2007 to 2013 after adjusting for inflation. Bank workers who conduct interviews for people requesting loans have seen their wages drop by 3.2 percent, and customer service reps have gotten a 2.5 percent cut in that same window.

Out of every 10 bank tellers in the country, three are enrolled in food stamps or another public assistance program. Considering that most such programs have far fewer people enrolled than are eligible for them, it’s likely that the ratio of tellers who qualify for public aid is even higher. Taxpayers spend nearly $900 million a year providing benefits to bring bank tellers and their families up to a subsistence-level income, which means everyone in the country is helping to subsidize bank profits.

Those profits are massive, as the CPD report notes. For every dollar in revenue that the 10 largest consumer banks in America bring in, they manage to keep 20 cents as pure profit after paying workers, overhead, and taxes. That large profit margin leaves plenty of room to pay workers enough to avoid poverty.

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