CPD IN THE NEWS

Democrat and Republican lawmakers on Wednesday took issue with the current structure of regional Federal Reserve Bank boards, though they couldn't agree on how to reform the quazi-private-public firms.

The twelve regional Fed banks have come under increased scrutiny in recent months after Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton issued a statement in May saying she supports removing bankers from regional Fed boards and increasing director diversity. Her comments heightened the public profile of an issue that otherwise hasn't received much focus.

A key point of debate was concerns by consumer groups that having bankers on regional Fed boards creates a conflict of interest since reserve bank staff supervise big and small commercial banks in their districts. This contrasts to the central bank in Washington, which is a government agency with governors that are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. 

For example, among the nine directors who serve on the New York Fed board are Morgan Stanley (MS) CEO James Gorman and two community bank chief executives.

House Republicans indicated during a subcommittee hearing of the House Financial Services Committee that they weren't overly concerned by bank CEOs serving on such quasi-private boards while Democrats questioned the diversity of the panels.

"I don't object to bankers being on the boards," Gwen Moore, D-Wisc., told reporters after the hearing. "I'm concerned about the voice of other directors who are there and their efficacy to participate fully and about mobilizing and empowering them once they are there."

Moore, the top Democrat on the Monetary Policy and Trade subcommittee, said she the boards need more diversity, noting that none of them have hired a Latino or African American as president of the regional Fed banks where they serve.

Meanwhile, demonstrators from a consortium of consumer groups calling itself "Fed Up" attended the hearing, dressed in green shirts with slogans such as "16 of 17 Fed leaders are white."

The group also took issue with bankers on the regional Fed boards and, in their view, a lack of board diversity.

"When these voices are excluded from the conversation, then our interests are excluded," Ruben Lucio, a representative from the Center for Popular Democracy and a member of Fed Up, told reporters outside of the hearing.

According to current rules, regional boards have nine directors divided into three classes. Three banking directors are elected by member banks, another three are designated by the same banks to represent the public and interests of commerce, industry, labor and consumers, and the final class is appointed by Fed governors to represent the public. 

Rep. Ed Perlmutter, D-Colo., said he wanted to delve more deeply into bank executives serving on the boards but noted that the Kansas City Fed, which covers the district he represents, appears to be quite diverse based on a variety of metrics.

It "has a diverse board ethnically, gender wise, labor wise, regional within the Fed and that was the template I'm using," Perlmutter said.

Two regional Fed presidents, meanwhile, pushed back against concerns about conflicts of interest during their testimony. 

Richmond Fed President Jeffrey Lacker noted that strict rules govern their conduct. "They simply have no avenue through which they can influence supervisory matters," Lacker said.

And Esther George, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, pointed out that bankers who serve on reserve bank boards are prohibited from participating in the selection of bank presidents.

Republicans, meanwhile, focused much of their attention on whether too much influence over monetary policy is wielded by the East Coast, particularly the New York Fed.

Rep. Bill Huizenga, R-Mich., and chairman of the monetary policy subcommittee, argued that lawmakers should back legislation he sponsored, the Federal Oversight Reform and Modernization Act, or FORM, which includes a provision that would reduce the influence of the New York bank.

The Federal Open Market Committee, the branch of the central bank that determines monetary policy, has 12 voting members made up of seven members of the Fed board of governors and five of the regional Fed banks.

The president of the New York Fed, which supervises Wall Street firms from JPMorgan Chase (JPM) to Goldman Sachs  (GS) and Citigroup (C) , is a permanent voting member but the other regional bank presidents serve rotating one-year terms. Huizenga's legislation would put the New York Fed president into the voting rotation along with all the other regional bank chiefs.

"For crying out loud, the San Francisco bank has a tremendously important area," Huizenga told reporters after the hearing. "Silicon Valley, that stretches from LA to Seattle, has tremendously valuable input and to have them only be a voting member every two or three years doesn't make a lot of sense to me."

Rep. Mia Love, R-Utah, said she was concerned that the Western states weren't well represented by the regional Fed bank structure.

"You have members on both sides of the aisle expressing concerns and I would like to know what might be done to rebalance the Fed to ensure that all Americans are represented in monetary policy decisions," she said. 

Don Lamson, of counsel at Squire Patton Boggs in Washington and a former regulator at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, suggested that if the goal is to create greater accountability to Congress, legislators should require the Fed regional bank system to be funded through congressional appropriations instead of the self-funding that exists now.

With that structure, legislators could remove the regional Fed boards, transforming the quazi-private-public entities into government agencies.

An appropriations process, however, would destroy the independence of the Fed, which is vital to setting interest rates and supervising banks appropriately, Moore argued.

Expanding legislative influence would also open Federal Reserve funding to unrelated policy measures that might be attached in an attempt to get them passed. "Come meet with me I'm the chairman of the Fed's appropriations committee," Moore said facetiously.

By Ronald Orol

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A year after Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico, there is a debate about whether the storm has created political winds that will prompt Connecticut’s Puerto Ricans to shed their reputation as unlikely voters.

Read the full article here.

Latin Times - Nov 07, 2013

Like the other 13 detainees set to appear before an immigration judge on Wednesday afternoon, Maximiliano Ortiz had been roused in the wee hours of the morning from his cell in a county jail.  Facing the judge at the Varick Street Immigration Court in Lower Manhattan, clothed in an orange jumpsuit, he looked groggy. 

"Are you arriving at this decision voluntarily?" the judge asked.  The interpreter translated the question into Spanish. 

"Yes," said Ortiz, and shortly afterward, having agreed to concede the charge of "entry without inspection" and accept an order of removal from the country, the first of about 190 poor, detained immigrant to receive pro bono legal representation via the city of New York was escorted out of the courtroom, chains jangling at his wrist and waist. 

On Wednesday, a coalition of seven public defender, legal advocacy and community activist groups unveiled the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project (NYIFUP), the first program in the nation to win public funding for legal defense of detained immigrants who cannot afford to hire lawyers.  In June, the New York City Council appropriated $500,000 for the pilot, which organizers say will be enough to meet about 20 percent of each year's need.  Under the program, detainees whose income falls at no more than 200 percent of the federal poverty line can receive pro bono legal counsel from New York Immigrant Defenders, which consists of public defender offices The Bronx Defenders and Brooklyn Defense Services. 

Organizers of the project trace its descent to the efforts of Second Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Robert Katzmann, who in 2010 commissioned two separate studies of detained immigrant representation in the city.  The odds those reports gave detainees were dim: of the 4,818 detainees who had to argue their case from 2005 to 2010, one found, only 3 percent of them did it successfully, compared to 74 percent of those who were represented and weren't held in detention in the time leading up to their appearance.  A separate study carried out previously by the City Bar Justice Center concluded that 39.2 percent of the 400 detainees it interviewed had "possibly meritorious claims for various forms of relief from removal". 

Immigration law is one of the most notoriously complex types, comparable to tax law.  But Lisa Schreibersdorf, founder and executive director of Brooklyn Defense Services, says detainees could win the right to remain in the country through a wide range of ways.  Some have status and don't know it.  "We had a kid who came to the country when he was two with his mom and dad.  The parents got separated, and he went to live with his mom.  His dad became a citizen before the kid turned 18.  Now, that's automatic citizenship for the child, but the kid didn't know.  When he was being interviewed by immigration officials, they'd ask if he was documented and he'd say, 'no'.  So off he goes."

Others who have green cards or visas might be able to stay because of a US citizen spouse; those without papers might be able to receive legal status of some sort - for example, victims of domestic violence or trafficking could apply for U or T visas, or young people who grew up in the US could apply for DACA. 

"People sometimes don't know, or they don't follow through and do it," she said.  "Even now that they're facing deportation, it's not too late.  You can still apply for those things, and that should actually negate the deportation proceeding.  That's really where I think most of the benefit is going to come from."

"Then there's the low-level criminal cases where deportation is not required and the judge has the ability to cancel the removal.  In that situation, a lawyer's very helpful because they explains to the judge what's going on with that family.  It's very hard for an individual who's unrepresented to know what to tell the judge, what kind of things are going to help them.  Plus it's very hard for people to speak in public.  That's what we're good at." 

On Wednesday, 10 of the 14 detainees who showed up for their initial court hearings were represented by lawyers provided by one of the two groups.  All of them were from Latin American countries.  Marianne Yang, the director of the immigration unit at Brooklyn Defense Services, says they expect demographics of clients to vary.  But according to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse(TRAC), a database of information obtained from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agencies, out of the top ten most common nationalities, eight of them are in Latin America.  The most typical profile for a detainee in NYC's immigration system is a Mexican (26 percent of all nationalities; Dominicans make up another 15 percent) who has been charged with "entry without inspection" -- a charge which accounts for about 47 percent of all detainees and some 89 percent of those who are from Mexico. 

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials say the agency only goes after immigrants who fit in its priority categories: someone who has committed serious crimes while in the US lawfully, people who crossed the border illegally in recent times and has few community ties, and "egregious immigration violators", or those have committed fraud or violated immigration law on multiple occasions.  But organizers point to the case of Carlos Rodríguez Vásquez, a 27-year-old cook from the Dominican Republic and husband to a US citizen wife who was arrested by the NYPD for "trespassing" in the apartment building of a friend in Washington Heights.  "In court, they dropped the charges right away, because I'd never had any kind of trouble with the law," he said.  But he'd never filed the paperwork to declare his marriage to his wife in the United States, and the NYPD passed him off to ICE, which transferred him to a detention facility in Hudson County, New Jersey. 

His family shelled out for a lawyer.  But when his case went before a judge, Vásquez says, "The lawyer I hired made me sign a voluntary deportation agreement without talking to me about it, without me knowing."  He ended up calling the Northern Manhattan Coalition for Immigrant Rights, which helped him win a retrial, but not before remaining in detention for an additional eight months.

In a report released on Thursday, the project's organizers argue that it makes good financial sense for the public, saying it will save New York state nearly $1.9 million per year in public health insurance spending, foster care services, and lost tax revenues.  It also says it'll help employers save $4 million annually which they lose through turnover when immigrants are forced to leave their jobs.  "Taken together," the report says, "these savings offset the majority of the investment needed to establish he program."

"It's presented as something which is just for immigrant families," said Brittny Saunders, senior staff attorney at the Center for Popular Democracy. "But in reality it's for everybody."

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This has been an incredibly disturbing election year: to a degree unprecedented in our lifetimes, hatred and xenophobia are being marshalled to support a reactionary nationalistic agenda. As leaders of Local Progress, a network of more than 500 progressive elected officials from cities and towns across the country, we stand together in support of a positive vision to make America great: economic inclusion, racial and gender equity, sustainable communities, and good government that serves the public interest.

This week, as Republicans and Democrats gather for their national conventions, Local Progress is releasing a national platform of our own. We adopted the platform on July 9 in Pittsburgh at our Fifth Annual Convening, which was attended by over 100 local elected officials from around the country and hosted by Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto.

Our platform lays out a series of practical and transformational steps that the federal government can take to promote strong, equitable cities. On an array of issues – from affordable housing and environmental protection to workers’ rights and police reform – we’ve identified strategies Congress and the executive branch can take to support, incentivize, and collaborate with local government officials like us who are trying to help our constituents build dignified and secure lives. You can read our full platform here.

With conservatives in control of Congress and a large majority of statehouses, many of the most important policy developments in recent years have come from the local level. In our cities of Minneapolis and New York, for example, we’ve passed paid sick days laws that guarantee workers time off to care for themselves and their loved ones. Earned sick time is a worker rights issue, but it’s also about gender and racial equity, because those previously lacking paid sick days are overwhelmingly women and people of color. Our cities are also confronting the affordable housing crisis with inclusionary housing laws; pushing for reform of our police departments to eliminate discriminatory policing and keep our communities safe; and shifting budget priorities to invest in the infrastructure, programs and services that help all of our constituents thrive.

These city policies have transformed the national discourse. Hillary Clinton’s support for a higher federal minimum wage is a testament to the power of the workers, community-based organizations, and policy advocates who set such a worthy goal and to Sen. Bernie Sanders, who did so much to build momentum for the issue and pull her along. But it’s also a testament to Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington DC, and other cities that have actually passed $15 minimum wages and are shifting the boundaries of mainstream discourse. The members of Local Progress have been at the frontlines of these fights in cities around the country, and we are proud to stand in the trenches with constituents who are working so bravely to build a more just society.

But the fact is that we cannot do it alone. The devastation wrought by the water crisis in Flint brought national attention to a reality being felt across the country: localities are starved of the resources they need to provide crucial services for their residents, particularly for low-income families and communities of color. As public servants, we believe in the power of government to improve the lives of our constituents. However, too often federal and state governments are an obstacle, not an aid, to advancing local policies that address these urgent issues.

In too many states, cities do not receive the financial resources they need to build strong schools, run proper public transit systems, or keep parks clean and safe. And we are often prohibited from passing laws to raise the revenue we need. Beyond financial constraints, many states are preempting cities’ ability to pass common sense regulations: smart gun safety laws, livable wages for workers (a limitation that affects New York City), and a just transition to a clean energy economy.

In short, we need the federal government to help us. Here are a few examples, drawn from our platform, that show how the next Congress and Administration can help city governments make a huge difference in our constituents’ lives:

The Department of Education can double down on investments in community schools that have been proven to reduce inequities, as well as restorative justice programs to help end the school-to-prison pipeline. And it can evaluate for-profit charter schools to determine whether they are exacerbating segregation and adhering to basic standards of accountability.

Congress can support the creation and preservation of affordable housing with a significant expansion of the Section 8 voucher program and public housing, as well as a stronger commitment to programs that prevent homelessness. And the Department of Housing and Urban Development can ensure the distressed mortgages it sells help the community – rather than Wall Street speculators.

The Department of Transportation can partner with cities to strengthen Vision Zero and “complete streets” initiatives that improve access to public transit and prioritize safety, sustainability, and racial and economic equity.

The Department of Labor can collaborate with cities to enforce labor standards and respond to the challenges created by the on-demand economy.

And, of course, the federal government must help eliminate the racially disparate impact of local policing and criminal justice systems. The Department of Justice should strengthen its oversight of local police departments, ensure that special prosecutors conduct investigations of alleged police misconduct, and curtail the transfers of military equipment to local departments. And it should incentivize the creation of alternatives to incarceration such as mental health and addiction services in both states and localities.

More than ever, we need strong cities and strong city leaders. The truth is that, right now, Congress is not working for the American people. Cities are leading the way, and will continue to do so. We hope that next year, with a new Congress and a President committed to inclusion, equity, and shared prosperity, Washington DC will give our nation’s cities the support we need to promote genuine social justice for America.

By RITCHIE TORRES AND LISA BENDER

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