Charter Schools Are Failing and Our Democracy Pays the Price
Charter Schools Are Failing and Our Democracy Pays the Price
Taxpayer dollars are filling the bank accounts of those who manage charter schools which is evident as research by In...
Taxpayer dollars are filling the bank accounts of those who manage charter schools which is evident as research by In the Public Interest and the Center for Popular Democracy that exposed the financial fraud and corruption running rampant in these schools. In California, $6 billion of public funding has been funneled into charter schools and their respective management companies leaving public schools starved for required public monies.
Read the full article here.
How to Build the Movement for Progressive Power, the Urban Way
As the gears of federal government have ground to a halt, a new energy has been rocking the foundations of our urban...
As the gears of federal government have ground to a halt, a new energy has been rocking the foundations of our urban centers. From Atlanta to Seattle and points in between, cities have begun seizing the initiative, transforming themselves into laboratories for progressive change. Cities Rising is The Nation’s chronicle of those urban experiments.
Cities are where the action is these days. Progressive action, political action. From paid sick days to universal pre-K, fossil-fuel divestment to anti-fracking ordinances, police reform to immigrant rights, the country’s urban centers are leading the way, far outpacing the federal government in vision and action. Just look at the growing movement for a $15 minimum wage. While Bernie Sanders has been raising minimum-wage consciousness on the campaign trail—introducing a bill in July to raise the federal minimum to $15 and calling for the same during the first Democratic presidential debate—it was local politicians, with names barely known beyond their districts, who first heeded the call of struggling workers and made $15 a reality. Before Bernie, in other words, there was Nick Licata and Kshama Sawant, Ruth Atkins, and the Emeryville City Council.
In recognition of this moment, progressive politicians from cities around the country—Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Denver, Philadelphia, and beyond—have joined forces to begin sharing their strategies for creative progressive change. Calling themselves Local Progress, they swap policy solutions to urgent, ongoing injustices like income inequality and police brutality, share model legislation and provide strategic support for legislative campaigns. Kind of like an urban anti-ALEC. Today, just three years after it was formed, more than 400 elected officials from 40 states are part of the effort. And the victories are beginning to add up—from paid parental leave in Boston to paid sick leave in New York City, socially responsible investing in Seattle to the use of eminent domain in Richmond, California, to slash homeowner debt.
This week, Local Progress members from all over the country are meeting in Los Angeles for the group’s fourth national gathering. From October 26 through 28, they aretrading their best ideas and strategies for building progressive local power—and combatting police violence, spreading the Fight for $15, expanding affordable housing, boosting civic engagement, and pushing the fight for LGBTQ rights beyond marriage equality.
Chuy Garcia, who gave Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel a run for his millions in this year’s election, will be on the scene, as will Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges, SEIU President Mary Kay Henry, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Tefere Gebre, and dozens of council members, alderman, and supervisors from around the country. If cities are the incubators of promising progressive ideas, this gathering is a bit like the annual science expo.
The Nation has asked four Local Progress stalwarts to share some of the policy solutions they’ll be discussing at the gathering. New York City Council members Brad Lander and Antonio Reynoso, San Francisco Supervisor John Avalos, and Chicago Alderman Scott Waguespack all weighed in, offering thoughts on everything from humanizing the sharing economy to organizing for police reform, protecting sanctuary cities, and pushing back against privatization and regressive tax policy. Here’s what they said.
—Lizzy Ratner
PROTECTING WORKERS IN THE ON-DEMAND ECONOMY
By Brad Lander
Rides from Uber. Home cleaning from Handy. Meals from Seamless. Web design from Upwork. Even doctors from Medicast.
There’s no doubt the on-demand economy is convenient. Consumers can arrange for services at the tap of a touchscreen. Workers can choose their hours and earn a little extra cash.
But there’s a very dark side to the “sharing” economy: The benefits aren’t usually shared with the workers.
Working “by-the-gig” rarely provides job security, health insurance, paid sick days or family leave, on-the-job training, or retirement contributions. Workers lack the right to organize a union. And eight in 10 freelance workers report having been cheated out of wages they were owed.
President Obama and Democratic presidential candidates are finally talking about the issue. But the Republican Congress will likely block any progress. Marco Rubio recently called for even further deregulation, leaving workers at the mercy of multibillion-dollar corporations.
So cities are taking the lead in writing new rules, working with Local Progress, the National Employment Law Project, forward-thinking unions, and worker organizations to level the on-demand playing field.
In Seattle, City Council member Mike O’Brien is fighting for a bill that would allow drivers for Uber, Lyft, and other “ridesharing” companies to organize and bargain collectively so that workers have some voice in the terms and conditions of their work.
In New York City, we are working with the Freelancers Union to combat wage theft and late payment. When conventional employees are cheated out of wages, the state labor department can enforce and win double damages. The #FreelanceIsntFree campaign (which recently brought its message to the White House) would provide freelancers with similar protection.
Council Member Corey Johnson and I are working with the New York City Taxi Workers Alliance to mandate a “driver benefits fund” (funded by a small fare surcharge) to provide for-hire drivers with healthcare benefits—a first step toward the “Shared Security Account” that Nick Hanauer and David Rolf called for in a Democracy Journal article this summer. And we’re amending New York City’s human-rights laws to make clear they apply to independent workers. There is no reason Uber should be able to discriminate against drivers based on race or religion.
Meanwhile, from San Francisco to Burlington, cities are establishing offices of labor standards and adopting other innovative approaches (like partnering with community-based organizations) to enforce the laws that protect workers. One task: making sure conventional employees aren’t illegally misclassified as independent workers by employers trying to cheat them out of benefits and protections (a big problem for day laborers and domestic workers). These offices can also make sure that companies who need licenses from the city get and keep them only if they respect local, state, and federal laws.
Ultimately, we’ll need national regulation to match the growing on-demand economy. But for now, progressive cities are bringing worker protections into the 21st century—and some real sharing into the sharing economy.
THE MUNICIPAL BATTLE FOR EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW
By Antonio Reynoso
Eric Garner. Michael Brown. Tamir Rice. Sandra Bland. For more than a year, the senseless deaths of young black men and women by police officers or in police custody have dominated headlines and helped fuel a movement. Under the banner of Black Lives Matter, this movement has been gaining ground in cities, towns, and counties across the country, spreading the call to end racist policing and begin enacting serious police reform. Its powerful message has reached all the way to the presidential campaign trail and beyond. But as the public waits for progress at the national level, change is already happening at the local level, thanks to powerful alliances between community activists and hundreds of local politicians.
In New York City, where I am a City Council member representingneighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens, there is a desperate need for sensible reforms of the New York City Police Department (NYPD). For all to many New Yorkers, the excessive use of police force is a daily reality. The excessive surveillance of the Muslim community and a racialized stop-and-frisk policy also take their toll.
In response, organizations and progressive politicians have been fighting to improve accountability and transparency after years of racial profiling by the NYPD. The work has been supported by a broad coalition called Communities United for Police Reform, which has driven a strategic, multi-year campaign to knock on doors, organize the public, influence the public discourse, and pass legislation to implement smart reforms.
Communities want change, and they want to participate in the process of reforming the NYPD. So, working together, we’ve introduced the Right To Know Act as a way to meet their demands. These bills would require NYPD officers not only to identify themselves when stopping civilians but also to explain that the searches are voluntary and may be declined.
This is not the first time we have stood up for the people of our community. In 2013 and 2014, in partnership with Communities United for Police Reform, the City Council passed a series of bills known as the Community Safety Act, which together banned racial profiling by police and made it easier for New Yorkers who have experienced profiling to sue NYPD officers. The act also installed an independent inspector general to oversee the actions of the NYPD.
Of course, New York City is not the only city in our nation where racial profiling, unjust searches, and incidences of police brutality are common occurrences. Nor is it the only city where coalitions of community leaders and elected officials are working to improve the system. In the last year alone, communities have joined together with progressive local legislators to correct the imbalance of justice.
In Los Angeles County, the grassroots organization Dignity and Power Nowwon a transformative campaign, led by formerly incarcerated people and their families, to establish a strong civilian oversight commission for the sheriff’s department, which has an ugly history of violence against civilians on the streets and in county jails.
In Newark, community leaders partnered with Mayor Ras Baraka to create one of strongest civilian complaint review boards in the country, which has both a voice in disciplining police officers and a policy advisory role.
And in Minneapolis, a coalition led by Neighborhoods Organizing for Change succeeded in pressing the City Council to repeal spitting and loitering ordinances that were being disproportionately used to harass and harm black and Latino residents. They also won passage of a data-collection law that will begin to collect and publicize important evidence about the police department’s stop-and-frisk and use-of-force practices.
Members of Local Progress, partnering with community-based allies, have been central to these fights and many more, and we will continue combating such injustices across the United States, fighting for everyone to be treated equally under the law.
CITIES MUST LEAD THE NATION ON IMMIGRANT JUSTICE
By John Avalos
In the last few years, hundreds of cities across America have disentangled their police departments and jails from the federal immigrant-deportation machine, refusing to honor the Feds’ requests that cities detain immigrants past their release date so they could be picked up and deported. These policies protect immigrant families from the devastation of deportation and from crime, because they foster better relationships between the police and immigrant communities. The movement has been a bright spot for our country’s immigrant-rights movement.
But during the last few months, the policies, and in some cases the very idea, of sanctuary cities has come under attack. The catalyst for these changes was an undocumented immigrant named Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez who allegedly shot and killed a young white woman named Kate Steinle. He claims that the shooting was an accident, but her case has become a cause célèbre among opponents of immigrants because Lopez-Sanchez had been deported five times previously, and had recently been released from jail in San Francisco without being turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
San Francisco’s Due Process for All Ordinance, the latest update to its Sanctuary City policy, bars the sheriff from detaining people past their release date on behalf of ICE’s Secure Communities, or S-Comm, program. The goal of Due Process for All is to protect immigrants and their families from S-Comm, which created an immigration dragnet, deporting tens of thousands of immigrants and tearing their families apart. Due Process for All also enables immigrants to be integrated into San Francisco’s local law-enforcement efforts by promoting relationships between immigrant communities and the police. San Francisco has been at the leading edge of a national movement: across the nation, over 350 other local governments have recently adopted policies limiting collaboration with federal immigration officials.
But as a result of the widespread effort of local governments to limit coordination with the S-Comm, the federal government has tweaked and renamed its deportation effort the Priority Enforcement Program (PEP), which calls on local law enforcement to notify Homeland Security of a detainee’s release rather than detaining the individual past his or her release date. Like S-Comm, PEP has the same effect of weakening trust between immigrants and local law enforcement because local law enforcement is seen as an arm of federal immigration efforts.
The politics of race, citizen entitlement, and immigration reform have put San Francisco and other cities’ sanctuary-city policies squarely in the cross hairs of conservative extremists and political opportunists. From the highly polarizing presidential campaign of Donald Trump to the calculated posturing of Hillary Clinton (who supports PEP) to the election-year pandering of San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, eager to blame the policy for Steinle’s death, politicians are scapegoating immigrants and undermining the sanctuary city policies that immigrants rely on for their security. Just last week, the US Senate narrowly failed to pass a Republican-backed bill that threatened to withhold federal grants from sanctuary cities and increase penalties for undocumented immigrants who reenter the United States after deportation.
Some cities are already working to resist this pressure. On the same day that Senate Republicans sought to punish sanctuary cities, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a resolution reaffirming our commitment to the Due Process for All Ordinance and urging our sheriff not to comply with the new PEP program.
Cities around the country should follow suit and adopt a wide array of programs and policies to protect and empower immigrant communities. Like New Haven, they can establish Municipal ID cards to help immigrants navigate daily life; like Chicago, they can ensure that city services are available in multiple languages; like New York, they can provide quality free legal counsel to residents facing deportation; and like Los Angeles, they can conduct outreach programs and offer affordable citizenship preparation courses to help residents naturalize and gain the benefits of citizenship.
This moment is a pivotal one for our nation and the many cities that have sought to protect immigrants against deportation. We either succumb to the rightward push of the politics of race and citizen entitlement or we strengthen our efforts to protect and integrate immigrants and their families in recognition and honor of the contributions they make to our society. Local governments must lead our nation forward.
FIGHT FOR A PROGRESSIVE SOURCE OF REVENUE IN CHICAGO
By Scott Waguespack
The fiscal crisis that’s squeezing cities and towns across this country is perhaps at its most dramatic in Chicago.
Our municipal pension systems are woefully underfunded, the result of decades of failure by city and state governments to pay their share. Our schools are facing an enormous fiscal shortfall that could result in the firing of 5,000 teachers in the middle of the year. And we’re witnessing heartbreaking violence in our communities, the result of an overwhelmed police force and neighborhoods mired in economic hardship.
Simply put, our city has a cash problem.
To his credit, Mayor Rahm Emanuel acknowledged this problem in his recent budget address, railing against the budgeting tricks of previous years and vowing to end the city’s structural deficit. Unfortunately, Mayor Emanuel reached into the same tired bag of tricks in order to solve the problem: regressive tax increases on working families and privatization of public services.
These are tricks we’re all too familiar with here in Chicago. We’ve already been through some of the worst privatization deals in the country, and we know full well from our experiences with parking meters and school janitors that it’s been a fiscal boondoggle resulting in higher costs and worse services for taxpayers. And the mayor’s regressive property-tax proposal is just another way to balance budgets by raising taxes on working families who are already struggling to get by.
Here’s the good news, though: Chicago is one of the wealthiest cities on the planet. There’s an enormous amount of capital flowing through this city every day. Chicago’s City Council Progressive Caucus, which I chair, has been advocating for common-sense tax ideas to direct some of these dollars toward crucial programs and services, easing the burden on working families without selling off public assets.
We’ve advocated for creating a special property-taxing district that covers the skyscrapers in downtown Chicago. Too often, owners of these buildings hire politically connected firms to get enormous discounts on their assessments; a more fair valuation would generate substantial new revenue.
We support reforming the billion-dollar mayoral slush fund called “tax-increment financing.” We support fixing the problems in the infamous parking-meter privatization deal. We introduced an amendment that would tax big-box stores for the undue stress they put on our stormwater system, and have called for expanding the sales tax to include luxury services like pet grooming or portfolio management.
In short, the Progressive Caucus has progressive revenue ideas that will work for all of Chicago. We’ve convened a series of town hall meetings across the city, drawing crowds of hundreds of concerned neighbors, and have introduced a series of amendments to move this budget in the right direction.
As progressive leaders who love this city, our caucus knows we need new revenue to educate our children, care for those in need, and provide growth and opportunity in every community. For our city to prosper, those dollars must come from those who can most afford to pay, not from the pockets of working families.
Equal pay is widely understood to be a feminist issue — so why isn't the Fight for $15?
Equal pay is widely understood to be a feminist issue — so why isn't the Fight for $15?
The idea that men and women should receive equal pay for equal work is probably among the least controversial feminist...
The idea that men and women should receive equal pay for equal work is probably among the least controversial feminist positions because, in 2017, it's pretty difficult to argue against.
Hollywood actresses like Patricia Arquette have traded in their standard acceptance speeches for impassioned calls for wage equality, while Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg created a whole new brand of feminism when she began coaching women on how to combat workplace inequality by "leaning in," making equal pay part of a mainstream dialogue...
Read full article here.
New Report Says NYC Latino Construction Workers Disproportionately Die On The Job
Fox News Latino – October 24, 2013 - A disproportional number of Latino construction workers in New York City die...
Fox News Latino – October 24, 2013 -
A disproportional number of Latino construction workers in New York City die while on the job compared to their coworkers of other races, according to a new report.
From 2003 to 2011, three-fourths of construction workers who died were either U.S.-born Latinos or immigrants, according to a review of all of the fatal falls on the job investigated by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, an agency of the federal Labor Department.
“The data we have demonstrates that Latinos and immigrants are more likely to die in these types of accidents,” Connie Razza, from the Center for Popular Democracy, which compiled the report, told the New York Daily News.
Construction safety advocates and a study by the New York State Trial Lawyers Association cited safety violations on job sites run by smaller, non-union contractors and an unwillingness by some undocumented workers to report violations as main reasons for the high number of deaths among Latino workers.
“Contractors aren’t taking simple steps to protect their workers,” said Razza. “They are not providing the training and the safety equipment that are required by law.”
While New York may have a surprisingly high number of deaths of Latino construction workers, numbers nationwide for Hispanic deaths on the jobs are also greater than any other group.
OSHA reported that 749 Latino workers were killed from work-related injuries in 2011— more than 14 deaths a week or two Latino workers killed every single day of the year. While 12 percent of all fatal work injuries in 2011 involved contractor work, Latinos made up 28 percent of fatal work injuries among contractors — well above their 16 percent share of all fatal work injuries in 2011.
Advocacy groups in New York are working to combat any changes to the state’s scaffolding law, which organizations like Razza’s the Center for Popular Democracy say gives incentive to keep workplaces safe.
Contractors argue that the law, which holds owners and contractors who did not follow safety rules fully liable for workplace injuries and deaths, has caused their insurance costs to skyrocket.
New York lawmakers, however, has historically blocked any of the proposed changes to the law.
“All we’re looking for is the ability to have the same right as anybody else would in the American jurisprudence system,” said Louis J. Coletti, president and CEO of the Building Trades Employers’ Association.
Source
Women workers vow to fight back after Supreme Court ruling
Women workers vow to fight back after Supreme Court ruling
“In early 2017, I became network president and co-executive director at the Center for Popular Democracy, a national...
“In early 2017, I became network president and co-executive director at the Center for Popular Democracy, a national network of more than 50 grassroots community organizing groups in 34 states, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C. In this capacity, I’ve had the opportunity to meet working women all across the country, and I’ve seen firsthand the commitment Freeman Brown is naming. Women, especially women of color, know that being a union member gives them greater economic security than their nonunion sisters have.”
Read the full article here.
A top regulator's close ties to Wall Street damage one of its most crucial functions 10 years after the crisis
A top regulator's close ties to Wall Street damage one of its most crucial functions 10 years after the crisis
“A new report from the Fed Up coalition, an activist group calling for more inclusive economic policies, says the key...
“A new report from the Fed Up coalition, an activist group calling for more inclusive economic policies, says the key regional Fed bank's conflicts lead to subpar regulation of Wall Street. As William Dudley, a former Goldman Sachs partner, prepares to retire as New York Fed president, Fed Up calls on the bank to "select a new president who will put the interests of the public before Wall Street. A new report from the Fed Up coalition, led by the Center for Popular Democracy, a Washington-based nonprofit, shows just how stark the lack of diversity in race, gender, and professional backgrounds has been at the New York Fed.”
Read the full article here.
In The Battle To Raise Minimum Wages, Businesses Opposed Are Outgunned
In The Battle To Raise Minimum Wages, Businesses Opposed Are Outgunned
This is the third post in a series about ballot measures to raise the minimum wage in Colorado and three other states....
This is the third post in a series about ballot measures to raise the minimum wage in Colorado and three other states. The first post introduced a restaurateur in Denver who supports the increase and the national organization that persuaded him to go public with that support, is here. The second looked at how the provision could widen inequality among servers and kitchen workers.
There are 32 mostly state and local business associations that have signed on to Keep Colorado Working, the coalition formed to fight Amendment 70, which would raise the state’s minimum wage through a constitutional amendment. Only one of them, however, has actually contributed money to fight the ballot measure: The Colorado Restaurant Association and its political action committee have spent $359,000, which makes it the single largest Colorado contributor to campaign, which has raised $1.7 million to date.
Indeed, while dozens of local food services businesses have chipped at least $105,000 to the effort, which has raised $1.7 million to date, more than $1 million has come into the coalition’s coffers from out of state, including $850,000 from a shadowy business group called the Workforce Fairness Institute. Other large national contributors include Darden, the Olive Garden’s parent corporation, and the National Restaurant Association.
But all this is far less than the $2 to $3 million that opponents had anticipated spending to try and defeat the amendment. And it is dwarfed by the $5.2 million that advocates for the vote, working under the name Colorado Families for a Fair Minimum Wage, have raised. Most of their money has come from national unions and union-backed organizations like The Fairness Project and progressive philanthropies like the Center for Popular Democracy and the Civic Participation Action Fund.
In a campaign awash with money, the efforts of Business for a Fair Minimum Wage, which has been organizing Colorado businesses to support the amendment, are fairly modest. Business for a Fair Minimum Wage founder and C.E.O. Holly Sklar won’t say how much her group is spending in Colorado, but the effort is being funded by Dr. Bronner’s, the organic soap-maker with a long history of activism. (She declines to further identify its funders, except to say that they comprise businesses and foundations.) Dr. Bronner’s has made raising the minimum wage a top company priority, even relabeling some of its soap bottles with “Fair Pay Today!” “People should be able to make ends meet on the wages they get,” says David Bronner, C.E.O. of his family’s company, which is registered as a benefit corporation. “They should not have to rely on inefficient government programs like food stamps and housing assistance. Taxpayers should not have to subsidize companies using the welfare system to keep wages low.”
Bronner says his company has given about $75,000 to Business for a Fair Minimum Wage. “We really like what they’re doing,” he says. “I think it’s really important that policy makers hear from business owners, that business owners too see value in raising the minimum wage, and it isn’t just about labor groups and worker rights.”
Outside of Colorado, business groups have mounted little more than token opposition. In each of Arizona, Maine, and Washington, where advocates have raised over $1 million to promote their respective ballot measures, opponents have raised $100,000 or less, according to state campaign finance records. The Arizona Restaurant Association sued to try and prevent the minimum wage from making the November ballot, but hasn’t spent any money combating it since then. (The group’s president and C.E.O., Steve Chucri, didn’t respond to requests for comment.) The state chamber of commerce has agreed to kick in $20,000.
In Maine, the state restaurant association has spent nearly $78,000 to fight the ballot amendment through its political action committee, but apart from small contributions from Darden ($7,500) and the National Restaurant Association ($2,500), the opposition has recorded no contributions from out of state.
It’s not clear — even to some of the principals — why Colorado became the battlefield of choice in the fight over minimum wage at the expense of media outlets in Arizona, Maine, and Washington. “Why they’re not putting money to fight it here is a mystery to me,” says Maine Restaurant Association president and C.E.O. Steve Hewins of the national organizations, though he allows that “Maine to a degree is off a lot of radar screens.”
The National Restaurant Association declined to respond directly to Hewins’s charge of neglect. But in an emailed statement, the organization’s spokesman, Steve Danon, wrote, “While we work in partnership, our state restaurant associations take the lead on these issues, as they know what works best for restaurateurs in their state. We’ve been vocal on opposing drastic increases to the minimum wage overall.” The Workforce Fairness Institute and Darden didn’t respond to a request for comment.
But Tyler Sandberg, who is managing the Keep Colorado Working campaign, suggests that perhaps national groups are drawn to the Colorado initiative because, as a constitutional amendment, it “is the worst-written of all of them.” But he also says he’s made a point of soliciting those contributions. “When we saw all the national money coming in on the other side, we realized we would have to fight fire with fire and seek national contributions as well.”
Sklar says her pro-wage-hike business group is focusing on Colorado because the Arizona and Washington measures also include paid sick leave, which is beyond her group’s scope, and in Maine a local small-business coalition is pressing the case.
In any event, the vast sums spent in Colorado appear to have made little difference. Polls in all four states show the wage increase winning by similar margins, with 55 percent to 60 percent of voters backing it.
By Robb Mandelbaum
Source
Ten Ways to Combat Upward Redistribution of Income
Moyers & Co - January 1, 2015, by Dean Baker - The big gainers in the last three decades (aka the one percent) like...
Moyers & Co - January 1, 2015, by Dean Baker - The big gainers in the last three decades (aka the one percent) like to pretend that their good fortune was simply the result of the natural workings of the market. This backdrop largely limits political debate in Washington. The main difference is that the conservatives want to keep all the money for themselves, while the liberals are willing to toss a few crumbs to the rest of the country in the form of food stamps, healthcare insurance, and other transfers.
While the crumbs are helpful, the serious among us have to be thinking about the unrigging of the economy so that all the money doesn’t flow upward in the first place. Here are 10 ways in which we should be looking to change the structure of the market in 2015 so that all the money doesn’t flow to the one percent.
In all these areas changes will be difficult, since the one percent will use their wealth and power to ensure that the rules not be rewritten to benefit the bulk of the country. However, this list should provide a useful set of market-friendly policies that will lead to both more equality and more growth.
1. Expanded Trade in Medical Care
The Affordable Care Act extended coverage to millions of people and, for the first time, allows people the freedom to quit jobs they don’t like and still have access to insurance. Nonetheless, we still pay close to twice as much per person for our health care as people in other wealthy countries.
If our trade policy were not dominated by protectionists, it would be directed toward making it easier for qualified foreign physicians to practice in the United States, potentially saving patients tens of billions every year. Even with the federal government committed to protectionist policies, nothing stops state governments from seeking out lower-cost care for Medicaid patients in other countries. The savings, which can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars in some cases, can be shared with beneficiaries.
2. Prescription Drugs
This is part of the healthcare story, but a big-enough part to deserve a separate mention. Patent monopolies can allow drug companies to charge prices that are 100 times higher than the free-market price. The hepatitis-C drug Sovaldi sells in the United States for $84,000. The generic version is available in India for less than $1,000. State Medicaid programs can pay to send patients to India, along with one or more family members, and still have tens of thousands of savings that can be shared with beneficiaries.
3. Wall Street Sales Tax
The financial sector continues to rake in money at the expense of the rest of the country, courtesy of bailouts, too-big-to-fail insurance, and being largely exempt from taxes applied to other industries. Even the IMF argues that the financial sector is undertaxed.
While most members of Congress and presidential candidates are too indebted to Wall Street to push for a financial-transactions tax, states can get a foot in the door. It is possible to tax the transfer of mortgages on property within the state. A modest tax of 0.2 percentage points won’t affect normal mortgage issuance, but it will discourage the shuffling of mortgages and raise some serious revenue. This money can be used to fund needed public services and, in part, to support lower taxes in other areas.
4. Limiting CEO Pay
CEOs are able to arrange paychecks in the tens of millions of dollars in large part because corporate directors are effectively paid off to look the other way. The incentives can be radically altered if directors stood to lose their stipends if a say-on-pay vote by the shareholders was defeated.
State governments can put this into law for corporations chartered in their state. Also, any corporation can put this rule into their own bylaws. Since fewer than three percent of pay packages are voted down, any director who is confident enough that they will not be in the bottom three percent should be happy to support such a change in bylaws.
5. Limiting Pay at Nonprofits
Nonprofit organizations like universities, hospitals, and charities are hugely subsidized by taxpayers. Since most of their contributions come from people in the top income bracket, the ability to deduct charitable contributions effectively means that taxpayers are paying 40 cents of every dollar a rich person contributes.
Since taxpayers are out for much of the cost, it seems only fair to put some rules in place. (Actually, we already do.) How about a pay cap of $400,000 for any employee of a nonprofit? This is twice the pay of a cabinet officer. If a university or other nonprofit can’t find competent people who are prepared to work for twice the pay of a cabinet secretary, perhaps it is not the sort of organization that taxpayers should be supporting.
States can also get into the act on this one. Most states offer special tax treatment to nonprofits. They could apply the two-times-a-cabinet-member’s-pay rule to the nonprofits within their state.
6. Applying Sales Tax to Internet Sales
Jeff Bezos has become one of the richest men in the world because he was successful in expanding Amazon into a huge retailer that doesn’t have to collect the same sales taxes as corner grocery stores. There is no excuse for giving special exemptions to Amazon and other Internet retailers. The states that don’t yet tax Internet sales in their state should move quickly to do so. It makes no sense to subsidize giant retailers like Amazon at the expense of traditional mom-and-pop retail outfits.
7. Democratizing the Sharing Economy
Start-ups like Airbnb and Uber have quickly turned into multi-billion-dollar businesses, in large part by evading the regulations that apply to their traditional competitors. The plan here should be to modernize the rules for taxis, hotels and other outposts of the “sharing” economy and be sure they apply to everyone equally. You don’t get to operate an unsafe taxi driven by an alcoholic just because it’s ordered over the Internet.
In the case of Airbnb, local governments could quickly add some new competition by having local websites where people could list available rooms without paying fees to Airbnb. The advantage to the cities is that they could be sure that these rooms met fire safety and other requirements. Then the only people who listed on Airbnb would be people renting fire traps or other illegal units or who were too ill-informed to save themselves the Airbnb commission. (This gives “sharing” economy a whole new meaning.)
8. The Overvalued Dollar
Our economists are learning and have discovered the problem of secular stagnation. This means that many economists now recognize that the economy can suffer from a persistent problem of inadequate demand, leading the economy to run at below-potential levels of output and to have excessive unemployment.
Unfortunately, most economists still don’t feel they can talk about the most obvious cause of the lack of demand: the country’s large trade deficit. The annual deficit is currently more than $500 billion (at three percent of GDP). This has the same effect on the economy as if consumers were to massively cut back their annual consumption by $500 billion and instead put this money under their mattress. The lost demand translates into more than six million jobs.
The obvious solution is to reduce the value of the dollar against other currencies in order to make US goods and services more competitive internationally. The value of the dollar is a matter that is determined at the national policy level. In principle the United States could be negotiating for a lower-valued dollar in a big trade agreement like the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Instead it is pushing for stronger patent protection for Merck and Pfizer, stronger copyright protection for Disney and Mickey Mouse, and a system of business-friendly courts that can override laws in the United States and elsewhere.
9. Shorter Work Years and Work Weeks
If we can’t directly increase demand in the economy through lowering the value of the dollar, we can still increase the number of jobs by reducing the amount of time that people work on average. This is the secret of Germany’s economic miracle. It has had slower growth than the United States, yet it has seen a huge increase in employment in its recession recovery. The average work year in Germany has 20-percent fewer hours than in the United States.
One of the policies that has helped bring about job growth in Germany is work sharing. This policy encourages companies to cut back hours instead of laying off workers. Workers are compensated for their lost wages through the unemployment insurance system. Most states have work-sharing programs as part of their unemployment insurance system. The compensation rate is generally lower in the United States than in Germany (typically 50 percent, compared with 60 to 80 percent in Germany), but it still beats losing a job.
Other policies that go in the same direction are paid family leave and paid sick days. These policies are important in their own right but can help better divide the available work among those who want jobs. Another great feature of these policies is that we don’t have to wait for the president and Congress to take action. They can be implemented at the state and even local level.
10. The Federal Reserve Board
The last and possibly most important item on the list is the Federal Reserve Board. It will be coming under pressure from the Wall Street types to raise interest rates. The point of higher interest rates is to slow the economy and keep people from getting jobs. The Fed would do this because more jobs will mean that workers have more bargaining power and would be in a position to raise wages. In short a Fed move to raise interest rates is very directly about keeping workers from getting higher wages. (Most workers have only been able to achieve real wage gains when the unemployment rate has been low.)
Fortunately, there are efforts to apply some pressure in the opposite direction, most importantly by the Center for Popular Democracy. They aim to let the Fed governors in Washington and presidents of 12 district Fed banks know that people who care about jobs are watching the Fed’s actions. This should make it harder for the Fed to take steps to deliberately throw people out of work and reduce workers’ bargaining power.
That’s my list of the top 10 places where progressives can focus in 2015 on restructuring the economy in ways that prevent income from flowing upward. The list is hardly exhaustive, and I left out some obvious important areas, like strengthening unions, because everyone should know them. Let’s hope for a good year and some real progress in turning the economy around.
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Hundreds march on Capitol Hill to call for a DACA replacement
Hundreds march on Capitol Hill to call for a DACA replacement
The Trump administration's decision to end the DACA program means thousands of undocumented individuals are on the...
The Trump administration's decision to end the DACA program means thousands of undocumented individuals are on the verge of being deported, despite having lived in the US for years. On Wednesday, protesters took to DC to call for the DREAM Act, which would build on DACA, creating a multi-phase process that would lead to permanent residency.
Read the full article here.
Regional Feds’ Head-Hunting Under Scrutiny Over Insider Bias, Delays
New York/Washington. Efforts to fill top positions at some US Federal Reserve regional branches are casting a spotlight...
New York/Washington. Efforts to fill top positions at some US Federal Reserve regional branches are casting a spotlight on a decades-old process that critics say is opaque, favors insiders, and is ripe for reform.
Patrick Harker took the reins as president of the Philadelphia Fed this week, in an appointment that attracted scrutiny because he served on the committee of directors that interviewed other prospective candidates for the job he ultimately took.
The Dallas Fed has been without a permanent president for more than three months as that search process stretches well into its eighth month. And the Fed’s Minneapolis branch abruptly announced the departure of its leader, Narayana Kocherlakota, more than a year before he was due to go, with no replacement named to date.
The delays and reliance on Fed employees in picking regional Fed presidents can only embolden Republican Senator Richard Shelby to push harder for a makeover of the central bank’s structure, which has changed little in its 101 years.
A bill passed in May by the Senate Banking Committee that Shelby chairs would strip the New York Fed’s board of its power to appoint its presidents. And it could go further, given the bill would form a committee to consider a wholesale overhaul of the Fed’s structure of 12 districts, which has not changed through the decades of shifting US populations and an evolving economy.
The bill is part of a broader conservative effort to expose the central bank to more oversight, and some analysts saw the Philadelphia Fed’s choice as reinforcing the view that the Fed needs to open up more to outsiders.
Nine of 11 current regional presidents came from within the Fed, a proportion that has edged up over time. Twenty years ago, seven of 12 were insiders.
“The process seems to create a diverse set of candidates in which the insider is almost always accepted,” said Aaron Klein, director of a financial regulatory reform effort at the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Since it was created in 1913, the central bank’s decentralized structure was meant to check the power of Washington, where seven Fed governors with permanent votes on policy are appointed by the White House and approved by the Senate.
The 12 Fed presidents who are picked by their regional boards usually vote on policy every two or three years, and they tend to hold more diverse views.
Former Richmond Fed President Alfred Broaddus told Reuters the regional Fed chiefs have more freedom “to do and say things that may not be politically popular” because they are not politically appointed. “On the other hand, there is the question of legitimacy since they are appointed by local boards who are not elected.”
“Tone deaf”
Two-thirds of regional Fed directors are selected by local bankers, while the rest are appointed by the Fed’s Board of Governors in Washington.
Critics question how well those regional boards — mostly made of the heads of corporations and industry groups meant to represent the public — fulfill their mission.
Last year, a non-profit group representing labor unions and community leaders organized by the Center for Popular Democracy, urged the Fed’s Philadelphia and Dallas branches to make the selection of their presidents more transparent and to include a member of the public in the effort.
Philadelphia’s Fed in particular proved “tone deaf” in its head-hunting effort, said Lou Crandall, chief economist at Wrightson ICAP in Jersey City, New Jersey.
Harker was a Philadelphia Fed director when the board started looking to replace president Charles Plosser, who left on March 1, and he was among the six directors who interviewed more than a dozen short-listed candidates for the job, according to the Philadelphia Fed.
But on Feb. 18, Harker floated his own name, recused himself from the process and a week later his colleagues on the board unanimously appointed him as the new president.
While the selection follows Fed guidelines and was approved by its Board of Governors, it raised questions of transparency and fairness.
“The Philadelphia Fed’s search process might have made perfect sense in a corporate environment, but is obviously problematic for an official institution,” said Crandall.
The board’s chair and vice chair, Swathmore Group founder James Nevels and Michael Angelakis of Comcast Corp, respectively, declined to comment, as did Harker.
Peter Conti-Brown, an academic fellow at Stanford Law School’s Rock Center for Corporate Governance, and an expert witness at a Senate Banking Committee hearing this year, proposed to let the Fed Board appoint and fire regional Fed presidents or at least have a say in the selection process.
In the past, reform proposals for the 12 regional Fed banks have focused on decreasing or increasing their number and their governance.
Changes to the way the regional Fed bosses are chosen could strengthen the influence of lawmakers at the expense of regional interests.
For now, delays in appointments of new chiefs force regional banks to send relatively unknown deputies to debate monetary policy at meetings in Washington, as Dallas and Philadelphia did last month when the Fed considered raising interest rates for the first time in nearly a decade.
The Minneapolis Fed still has time to find a new president before Kocherlakota steps down at year end.
“For now the Fed criticism is just noise, mostly from Republicans,” said Greg Valliere, chief political strategist at Potomac Research Group. “But once the Fed begins to raise interest rates … then the left will weigh in as well.”
Source: Jakarta Globe
4 days ago
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