It’s true: HUD policy really does hurt our neighborhoods
It’s true: HUD policy really does hurt our neighborhoods
HUD has a program that sells tens of thousands of troubled mortgages across the country, many in black and Latino...
HUD has a program that sells tens of thousands of troubled mortgages across the country, many in black and Latino neighborhoods hard hit by the housing crisis, to Wall Street speculators - at a discount! Please let that sink in.
Since 2010, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has been auctioning off pools of very delinquent mortgages through a program they call Distressed Asset Sales Program, or DASP. In most cases, the sales have gone to the highest bidder, which have been hedge funds and private equity firms.
Lone Star Fund, a private equity firm started by a Texas billionaire, and Bayview Asset Management, an affiliate of the private equity firm Blackstone Group, have been two of the primary beneficiaries of these sales. The result? Struggling homeowners lose their homes and speculators turn the properties into high-cost rentals that contribute to displacement in communities across the country.
This month, over 110,000 people from across the country signed a petition calling on HUD Secretary Julian Castro, to change this program. This comes on the heels of a March 1st letter to HUD from 45 members of Congress issuing a similar call for reforms to this mortgage sale program. In fact, for over two years, housing advocates and national policy groups have been pushing HUD to fix this program.
In an interview on WNYC Studio’s “The New York Radio Hour,” Secretary Castro referred to our protests that his program is enriching Wall Street as “sloganeering.” We wish that were the case. Unfortunately, it is simply a fact that 98% of the mortgages sold through HUD’s DASP program are going to Wall Street, one that can be verified on HUD’s own website where they post reports from these sales. Most, if not all, of these Wall Street buyers are what the industry itself calls “vulture capitalists” – investors that specialized in distressed assets in the hopes of making them more profitable and selling them for a profit.
In an effort to suggest that he has addressed the problem, Secretary Castro touts the agency’s 2015 auctions of troubled mortgages in which only non-profits were eligible to bid. Let’s be clear. Only 172 mortgages were sold to non-profits through these auctions, while a whopping 15,309 went to Wall Street investors in 2015. So yes, a gesture was made by the agency, but at such a miniscule scale he surely cannot suggest that the problem is solved.
There is no reason to sell such a high percentage of these loans to some of the same culprits responsible for the housing crisis in the first place. In fact, it seems to be in direct conflict with HUD’s mission to create strong, sustainable, inclusive communities and quality affordable homes for all. Call me skeptical, but I don’t trust a private equity firm like Blackstone – a company whose CEO made $734 million last year - to help fulfill that mission. Blackstone and other major speculators have a goal of making as much money as possible, and in the process are chipping away at the wealth and stability of neighborhoods in the process.
There is a viable alternative, that housing and civil rights groups across the country are calling for. HUD should prioritize selling these loans to good actors that have a community-centered plan to save homes from foreclosure when possible and, when foreclosure cannot be avoided, to meet the affordable housing needs of the community with their property disposition plans.
A growing number of Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) have programs to do just this, and have raised the capital needed to buy pools of these delinquent mortgages. But so far, they haven’t been able to get their hands on the number of mortgages that they can afford. HUD should do all it can to make sure CDFIs and other good actors are prioritized for these sales.
I have seen too many people in my community lose their homes and their wealth to Wall Street speculators. We cannot allow the same policies that ravaged our communities to continue. For me the choice is very clear: will Secretary Castro make sure that HUD helps families stay in their homes, or will he allow HUD to continue to sign over these loans to Wall Street and fuel neighborhood displacement?
It’s time for HUD to make the right choice and partner with non-profit CDFIs and other organizations that will keep our neighborhoods together. I encourage everyone who cares about the stability of neighborhoods across the country to join with me in calling on Secretary Castro and HUD to change the DASP program so that it prioritizes foreclosure avoidance and the creation of affordable housing.
By Ana Maria Archila
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Report Shows Unemployment Rate in Twin Cities 4x Higher for Blacks than Whites
InsightNews - March 18, 2015 - At a press conference and rally last week, NOC released a report as part of a national...
InsightNews - March 18, 2015 - At a press conference and rally last week, NOC released a report as part of a national day of action, showing that the unemployment rate for Blacks in the Twin Cities is four times higher than for whites, calling on the Federal Reserve to prioritize full employment in all communities. "Minnesota is a great place to live, if you're white," said NOC executive director Anthony Newby. "The unemployment rate is 2.8%. But for black folks, unemployment is over ten percent--crisis levels. The Federal Reserve is considering raising interest rates because Wall Street thinks the economy has recovered. But that would only increase unemployment, especially in communities of color."
"Historically, the African-American community has been cut out of opportunities the government was supposedly providing to everyone--for example, homeownership programs that African-Americans could not participate in, public education programs that African-Americans were either cut out of or cut short, livable wage jobs that African-Americans would not be considered for," said Pastor Paul Slack, pastor of New Creation Church in Minneapolis and President of ISAIAH. "It's time for the Federal Reserve to act specifically in the interest of the African-American community and other low-income communities, by keeping interest rates low so that we can rebuild the wealth that was stolen from us through this recent economic crisis."Joe Elliott worked at the Target Center for five years until he was unexpectedly laid off. "I liked the job--I met a lot of great people, and went to concerts and games. But I didn't like the money. I deserve more than $8.40/hour. It wasn't supporting my daily living--bills, kids, transportation. But it's hard looking for a job as an African-American male.""The Minneapolis Fed President, Narayana Kocherlakota, has expressed support for keeping interest rates low," said Anthony Newby. "That's great. But he's also retiring in a year. We need an open and transparent process for community input on the next Minneapolis Fed president."The Federal Reserve has a key policymaking meeting coming up in mid-March.
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Who will win America's worst employer contest?
As pageants go, here's one whose contestants might want Steve Harvey to spare them the crown. The Center for Popular...
As pageants go, here's one whose contestants might want Steve Harvey to spare them the crown.
The Center for Popular Democracy on Wednesday debuted the Worst Employer in America Pageant theworstemployers.com. Eight companies, including Deerfield-based Walgreens, were selected as nominees, and people are being asked to vote on which is worst "based on such bad behaviors as a poor CEO to median worker pay ratio, failure to pay minimum wage and overtime, worker lawsuits against companies, or forcing workers to work through breaks, among other egregious practices."
A "winner" will be named Feb. 29. No word yet on the "prize," which will be announced the same day.
The nonprofit, which advocates for low-wage workers and immigrants among other progressive causes, is pitting two employers against each other in four categories. In banking, voters choose between Bank of America and Wells Fargo. In supermarkets, it's Sam's Club vs. Whole Foods. Among drugstores, Walgreens is up against CVS. And among pizza chains, Papa John's competes with Yum! Brands, owner of Pizza Hut.
"America's most recognizable brands are some of our biggest employers and we want to highlight their poor treatment of employees," JoEllen Chernow, director of economic justice at the Center for Popular Democracy, said in a statement. "Consumers are no longer just judging companies on how much they like their products or the efficiency of their services. In 2016, customers care about how companies treat their workers full stop. Yup, it's a thing."
In selecting the nominees, the group considered national corporations that provide everyday services to consumers, have at least 20,000 employees, are ubiquitous brands and have recently been in the news for employee-related issues.
As they click through the contest, voters will find short explanations of what landed each company on the podium.
For Walgreens, the group claims "part-time workers can't afford to get sick," because only workers who average 30 hours or more a week are eligible for paid sick time. It also claims that the CEO's 2014 pay was 540 times the median pay of Walgreens workers. Total compensation for then-Walgreens CEO Gregory Wassonwas $16.7 million, the Tribune has reported.
Walgreens declined to comment. But a spokesperson clarified that its policy is that anyone who averages 20 hours a week qualifies for paid sick leave.
As for Walgreens' opponent, the group claims CVS' CEO got a 26 percent raise in 2014 that brought his salary to $23 million, while workers making $9 an hour got less than a 5 percent bump. It also accused the company of not offering part-timers paid sick leave and mentioned a lawsuit in New York alleging that workers were ordered to racially profile nonwhite shoppers.
In an emailed statement accusing the "pageant" of relying on inaccurate and incomplete information, CVS spokesman Mike DeAngelis countered that its CEO pay is in line with industry standards and that workers who average 30 hours a week are eligible for benefits. He added that the company has firm nondiscrimination policies and is vigorously defending itself against the lawsuit.
Whole Foods spokesperson Allison Phelps noted that the company has been named one of Fortune's 100 best companies to work for for 18 consecutive years, a contest based on employee surveys.
Yum! Brands said it pays employees above the applicable minimum wage on average at its company-owned restaurants. Among the group's gripes with Yum was that it doesn't reimburse drivers for costs associated with delivery work, resulting in their receiving less than minimum wage.
Wells Fargo declined to comment. The other companies listed in the pageant did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Source: Chicago Tribune
We’re onto the phony education reformers: Charter school charlatans and faux reformers take it on the chin
2015 will forever be remembered as the year the political establishment was shaken by the populist-driven presidential...
2015 will forever be remembered as the year the political establishment was shaken by the populist-driven presidential candidacies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. But it should also be remembered as the year another established order was forever altered by change, dissent and revelations of its corruption.
For years, an out-of-touch establishment has dominated education policy too. A well-funded elite has labeled public education as generally a failed enterprise and insisted that only a regime of standardized testing and charter schools can make schools and educators more “accountable.” Politicians and pundits across the political spectrum have adopted this narrative of “reform” and now easily slip into the rhetoric that supports it without hesitation.
But in 2013 a grassroots rebellion growing out of inner city neighborhoods from Newark to Chicago and suburban boroughs from Long Island to Denver began to counter the education aristocracy and tell an alternative tale about schools.
The education counter-narrative is that public schools are not as much the perpetrators of failure as they are victims of resource deprivation, inequity in the system and undermining forces driven by corruption and greed. In other words, it wasn’t schools that needed to be made more accountable; it was the failed leadership of those in the business and government establishment that needed more accountability.
The uprising has been steadily growing into an Education Spring unifying diverse factions across the nation in efforts to reverse education policy mandates and bolster public schools instead of punishing them and closing them down.
2015 became the year the uprising reached a level where it forever transformed the hegemonic control the reformers have had on education policy.
Most prominently, No Child Left Behind, the federal law that’s been driving education policy since 2001, was replaced with a new law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, thatreverses many of the edicts of NCLB or leaves them up in the air for states and courts to decide.
Also, comments made by establishment presidential candidate Hillary Clinton will reverberate through the election in 2016. Specifically, at a town hall held in South Carolina, broadcast by C-SPAN, Clinton responded to a question about charter schools by saying, “Most charter schools, I don’t want to say every one, but most charter schools, they don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids. Or if they do, they don’t keep them.” A week or so later, Clinton transgressed the status quo again by remarking, in a conversation with members of the American Federation of Teachers, “I have for a very long time also been against the idea that you tie teacher evaluation and even teacher pay to test outcomes. There’s no evidence. There’s no evidence.”
Organizations and individuals connected to wealthy donors to the Democratic Partywere appalled, but the truth is out, and skepticism about education policy prescriptions touted as necessary “reforms” to the system has now left the fringe and become mainstream.
The bigger, more important story emerging from 2015 is that the American public is increasingly at odds with a reform movement that seeks to remake schools into an image promoted by wealthy private foundations, influential think tanks and well-financed political operations such as the American Legislative Exchange Council(ALEC).
The evidence against the education establishment’s case piled up as the year rolled on, and the narrative of public education policy will never be the same.
Blows to the Testocracy
Take the issue of standardized testing. The idea that school improvement should be about enforcing uniform measures of test score outcomes across the nation had a particularly bad year in 2015.
As Seattle classroom teacher and public school activist Jesse Hagopian explains in an article for the National Education Association, standardized tests became the focal point of widespread scorn and dissent.
More than 620,000 public school students around the U.S. refused to take standardized exams. Also, numerous states ended high school graduation tests, and dozens of universities and colleges reduced or eliminated test requirements for their admissions process.
The backlash to standardized testing prompted changes in federal policy as well, including the revision of NCLB. As Hagopian writes, “ESSA deposes one of the cruelest aspects of the test-and-punish policy under NCLB: the so-called ‘Adequate Yearly Progress’ annual test score improvement requirement that labeled nearly every American school failing.”
Also, as Hagopian notes, President Obama, acknowledging the growing resistance to testing, “announced in October that ‘unnecessary testing’ is ‘consuming too much instructional time.’ This announcement came as a surprise given Obama’s support for policies like Race to the Top that contributed to the proliferation of high-stakes testing. The reversal of rhetoric was a result of the mass opt-out movement and will surely embolden authentic-assessment activists in the coming year.”
“Pressure from parents, students, teachers, school officials, and community leaders began turning the tide against standardized exam overuse and misuse during the 2014-2015 school year,” declares a report from the National Center for Fair and Open Testing (FairTest.org).
FairTest’s report highlights “assessment reform victories” in numerous states where officials suspended or significantly revised testing policies and created “alternative systems of assessment and accountability” that “deemphasize standardized tests.”
Think Progress, the action center of the left-leaning Beltway think tank the Center for American Progress, also reports on the overturn of the testocracy in its review: “these education protests got results in 2015.”
Noting the growing opt-out movement in Colorado, New Jersey, Indiana, Michigan, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Oregon and Wisconsin, the Think Progress writer highlights New York in particular, “where 20 percent of students opted out of tests in 2015. The number of New York students opting out quadrupled from [2014].”
Reform Is Losing the Left
New York in particular provides an example of how education reform may fare in the near future, at least in left-leaning states where leaders have been persuaded by big-money donors to crack down on public schools and educators.
Led by Governor Andrew Cuomo and his former state education chief, now currently acting U.S. Secretary of Education, John King, the Empire State had been a model for reform ideology, being among the first to implement the Common Core and its associated tests and pursuing a harsh new model for evaluating teachers, in which 50 percent of teachers’ performance rating was tied to students’ test scores.
But recently Cuomo made “a complete about face” on education, observes a recent op-ed in a New York press outlet. The writer – Billy Easton, executive director of the Alliance for Quality Education, a progressive New York state organization – notes that Cuomo had made his test-based teacher evaluation system the “top legislative priority in 2015″ and had claimed it was ”one of the greatest legacies for me and the state.”
But the evaluation system had angered teachers and parents and helped spur the test boycotts noted above. Seeing his public approval numbers plummeting, Cuomo engineered, according to Easton, a redo on the evaluation system that prompted the state education authority to place a moratorium on test-based teacher evaluations.
Easton believes Cuomo’s actions in New York are likely too little, too late – arguing that he has been “the author of his own demise on education issues.” That may be, but far more likely, other Democratic Party governors are bound to notice how reform policies like those carried out in New York have now lost the left and are rapidly growing out of favor with the public at large.
Of course, in states and districts where test-based teacher evaluations are already established in the policy landscape, teachers will likely feel the effects of these systems for some time. So the fight over teacher evaluations will go state by state in the years ahead.
But as new reports continue to call these flawed and unfair evaluations into question, there will be more examples of these systems being overturned.
Reform Fads Don’t Work
Using test scores to evaluate teachers – one of the pillars of the reform movement – is not the only policy idea going out of favor. Using the scores to evaluate the viability of local schools is running into more opposition as well
In Tennessee, also an early adopter of reform fads, leaders had put into place a system that used student scores on standardized tests to pronounce schools as “failing” and provide the rationale for the state to take over management of the schools by an appointed board. What follows these takeovers, invariably, is that the agency, whose officials are handpicked by conservative lawmakers, transfers the schools to privately operated charter management organizations.
In Tennessee, the state takeover agency is called the Achievement School District, but the model is being adopted under other guises by many other states.
Now Tennessee’s much-lauded takeover program has run into “political trouble” according to a recent article in Education Week.
“Several Democratic state lawmakers,” according to the article, “will propose bills this upcoming legislative session to either shut down the turnaround district, which mostly is based in Memphis, or severely limit its authority to take over schools.”
The legislature’s Black Caucus, the representatives of the communities most often targeted by the takeovers, are helping to lead the pushback.
In Memphis, where the ASD has charterized more than two dozen schools, parents are leading the fight as well. As Chalkbeat Tennessee reports, members of the district’s neighborhood advisory councils have called the takeover process a “scam” and claimed the method for taking over their neighborhood schools “was rigged in favor of pairing struggling schools with charter operators.”
But the trouble with the ASD isn’t purely “political.” The takeover effort is also in trouble because it doesn’t work. The EdWeek article points to a recent Vanderbilt University study that showed district-led turnaround efforts had performed better than the the ASD. The study concluded, “Until the state-run district can begin to show academic progress, it shouldn’t be allowed to take over more schools.”
These events and others prove 2015 marks the year that standardized testing – and all its associated uses for unfairly judging teachers and schools – has now become a policy pariah. So what will reformers rally around now?
A Year of Charter School Scandals
For sure, charter schools provided reform fans with some cause to celebrate in 2015, as more than 500 new public charter schools opened during the school year, enrolling nearly 3 million students nationwide, according to charter industry reports.
As a recent report from a consulting group that works with the charter industry found, 2015 was a year in which charter schools reached impressive new benchmarks. These schools are now the most rapidly growing form of schools in America, with enrollments expanding by an average of 12 to 13 percent annually over the past 10 years. Charters now educate one in 16 children nationally and, in a number of big cities, now rival traditional school districts as the major provider of public education. Three of the nation’s five largest cities enroll more than 20 percentof their students in charter schools.
What’s growing particularly rapidly are large charter school chains, which have expanded at roughly twice the pace of the charter industry overall, increasing their student enrollments by 25 percent annually.
But charter school expansions come with a significant negative to the reform movement. As the numbers and influence of these schools grow, so do the scandals associated with them and so do the divisive fights in communities where these schools are proliferating.
The scandals and malfeasance associated with charter schools rose to levels in 2015 beyond what emerged in 2014.
Early in the year, a report from the Center for Popular Democracy looked at charter school finances in Illinois and found “$13.1 million in fraud by charter school officials … Because of the lack of transparency and necessary oversight, total fraud is estimated at $27.7 million in 2014 alone.”
One example the CPD report cited was of a charter operator in Chicago who used charter school funds amounting to more than $250,000 to purchase personal items from luxury department stores, including $2,000 on hair care and cosmetic products and $5,800 for jewelry.
In April, another report from the Center for Popular Democracy, along with the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools (AROS), uncovered over $200 million in “alleged and confirmed financial fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement” committed by charter schools around the country.
Authors of the report called $200-plus million the “tip of the iceberg,” because much of the fraud “will go undetected because the federal government, the states, and local charter authorizers lack the oversight necessary to detect the fraud.”
Then, in October, the Center for Media and Democracy published a new reportrevealing that the federal government has spent over $3.7 billion in taxpayer money on charter schools with virtually no accountability for the funds.
According to the report, the federal government, state governments and charter authorizers have generally not provided the public with ready information about how federal funds for charters have been spent. Attempts to trace federal grant money to recipients are apt to encounter “substantial obstruction” from states reluctant to reveal how charter money is spent and how state government handles charter oversight.
The report contends, “Unlike truly public schools, which have to account for prospective and past spending in public budgets provided to democratically elected school boards, charter spending is largely a black hole.”
In Michigan, for instance, where four out of five charters are run by for-profit management companies, CMD found “ghost schools“ that had received millions in federal funding but either never opened or were quickly closed with no account for the money. Some charter operators in the state have been accused, and convicted, of crimes, including felony fraud and tax evasion. But most often, no perpetrators of the malfeasance are brought to justice.
Interspersed among these massive reports are news stories from local press outlets, too numerous to count, about charter school frauds, financial and academic, that boggle the mind in their outrageousness.
In May, an Ohio paper began its news story about Ohio charter schools, “No sector – not local governments, school districts, court systems, public universities or hospitals – misspends tax dollars like charter schools in Ohio.” Reporter Doug Livingston wrote, “State auditors have uncovered $27.3 million improperly spent by charter schools, many run by for-profit companies, enrolling thousands of children and producing academic results that rival the worst in the nation.”
Charter school malfeasance in the Buckeye State has gotten so bad it’s even drawn the attention of FBI investigators.
More recently, Florida press outlets reported the state has given about $70 million to charter schools that later closed and returned virtually none of the money to taxpayers. While the state is able to recover computers and other equipment these schools purchased with taxpayer money, the far more substantial costs for purchasing and improving property and making lease payments stays in private pockets after the schools close.
Why Charter Schools Won’t Save Reform
Scandals will continue to dog charter schools because of the way they are organized and operated. As a recent policy brief from the National Education Policy Center explains, the very structure of the charter school business introduces new actors into public education who skim money from the system without returning any benefit to students and taxpayers.
In one of the more bizarre schemes the authors examine, charter operators use third-party corporations to purchase buildings and land from the public school district itself, so taxpayer dollars are used to purchase property from the public. Thus, the public ends up paying twice for the school, and the property becomes an asset of a private corporation.
In other examples, charter operators will set up leasing agreements and lucrative management fees between multiple entities that end up extracting resources that might otherwise be dedicated to direct services for children.
These arrangements, and many others documented in the brief, constitute a rapidly expanding parallel school system in America, populated with enterprises and individuals who work in secret to suck money out of public education.
Meanwhile, charter expansions continue to be met with increased community resistance wherever they roll out.
In Nashville, Tennessee, Jefferson County, Colorado, and across South Florida, every new charter school expansion is now met with fierce opposition from the community.
As the Los Angles Times reported in September, a plan devised in secret by a billionaire and his foundation would pay for the capital costs and lobbying to force through a plan to convert as many as half of the city’s schools into charters. The community has responded with outrage.
In what is likely to be an important legal precedent, the supreme court of the state of Washington found that charter schools are unconstitutional because they aren’t truly public schools.
Now calls for charter school moratoriums are becoming practically ubiquitous in state legislatures and local district school boards.
The mounting controversy surrounding charter schools is a strong indicator that if education reform proponents collect all their policy eggs in the basket of “school choice,” they are missing the main reasons why their movement is spurring increased resistance.
What Reform Fans Don’t Get
Indeed, resistance to the education reform agenda is not as much a rejection of its various policy features as it is a rejection of the philosophy that drives it.
This philosophy puts little stock in democratic governance of schools, believing instead that really smart people, armed with the right data and algorithms, are what it takes to determine education policy from New York to Nevada.
This core philosophy makes infinite sense to folks with backgrounds in law, business management, finance, or economics, but tends to rub educators and parents the wrong way because of its failure to acknowledge that teaching and learning are primarily relationship-driven endeavors and not technical pursuits.
To teachers, it makes about as much sense to base their actions exclusively on a data set or a marketing principle as it would for husbands and wives to conduct their marriages on that basis or for parents to raise their children that way. Sure, knowing some objective “things” about how students are doing is important, but there’s way more important stuff to attend to.
And parents will grow ever more skeptical of the false promise of “school choice” because it doesn’t deliver what they really want: the guarantee of good neighborhood schools that are free and equitable to all children.
But too few reformers get this. Instead, what we can expect in 2016 is for the current education establishment to use the considerable financial resources at its disposal to mount yet more marketing and public relations efforts, while the pushback from grassroots public education advocates will grow even stronger, and political leaders will be increasingly pressured to decide where they stand.
Source: Salon
Immigrants, Advocates Rally For New York State Citizenship
CBS New York - June 16, 2014 - They are not U.S. citizens, but a plan is in the works to allow undocumented New Yorkers...
CBS New York - June 16, 2014 - They are not U.S. citizens, but a plan is in the works to allow undocumented New Yorkers to become citizens of the state.
Chanting “New York is my home” and with the Statue of Liberty in the background, immigrants and their advocates rallied for New York state citizenship in Battery Park on Monday, WCBS 880′s Peter Haskell reported.
The bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Gustavo Rivera, D-Bronx, said the legislation would grant state citizenship if “someone can demonstrate proof of identity, live here for three consecutive years, pay taxes for three consecutive years.”
Assemblyman Karim Camara, D-Brooklyn, said state citizenship would allow 2.7 million immigrants to legally drive, vote in state and local elections and receive tuition aid.
“We have the opportunity now to step in where the federal government has not and make New York stronger by strengthening the rights of new immigrants,” Camara said.
The bill is not likely to pass, but is being called a conversation starter, Haskell reported.
“We deserve to receive the aid necessary for us to go to college,” said Antonio Alarcon, 19. “We deserve to vote. We deserve to drive.”
Source
Will Another White Big-Banker Oversee Wall Street?
Will Another White Big-Banker Oversee Wall Street?
“Fed Up, a coalition of community and labor groups, argues in a new report that this homogeneity creates blind spots,...
“Fed Up, a coalition of community and labor groups, argues in a new report that this homogeneity creates blind spots, protecting financial institutions while neglecting those who are still struggling 10 years after the financial crisis struck. Fed Up was formed to highlight how central bankers neglect corners of the economy. Though the Fed is supposed to be independent of politics, its decisions affect everyone, especially vulnerable populations who need support. An economy run for banks, inattentive to black and brown families, will necessarily expand the wide wealth and income gaps. The New York Fed’s district also includes Puerto Rico, which is especially struggling of late.”
Read the full article here.
“We matter”: Dozens with pre-existing conditions stage D.C. sit-in over GOP health care bill
“We matter”: Dozens with pre-existing conditions stage D.C. sit-in over GOP health care bill
Marthella Johnson was born with one kidney. At a young age, the 42-year-old resident of Little Rock, Arkansas,...
Marthella Johnson was born with one kidney. At a young age, the 42-year-old resident of Little Rock, Arkansas, developed kidney stones.
Before the Affordable Care Act, many insurers considered kidney stones a pre-existing condition and wouldn’t insure people like Johnson. After it went into effect, Johnson said she was able to buy insurance through her state’s marketplace.
Read the full article here.
One vote will turn America’s path away from liberal socialism
WASHINGTON, Oct. 17, 2015 – What difference will my vote make? Too many will say: I am only one person. When asked why...
WASHINGTON, Oct. 17, 2015 – What difference will my vote make? Too many will say: I am only one person. When asked why they do not exercise our constitutional right to vote for our governmental representatives they wonder if their one vote makes a difference.
But that is foolish as history has shown that “one person” can prevail.
It was one brave soldier standing alone during a mass protest who stopped a column of armed tanks in China on Tiananmen Square in 1989; one frail man named Mahatmas Gandhi who was the driving force behind banishing the British Empire from India; one conservative, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, who was the black community’s conscience when it needed someone to articulate the horrors inflicted upon blacks by a racist Democratic South.
Even before these 20th century [peaceful] activists, back in the 1860s, there was one conservative black Frederick Douglass. Douglas stood out as a champion of an enslaved people, the fight for their civil rights.
Frederick Douglass made it his life’s mission to rally others to join in with him in the liberation of his oppressed people. Born a slave, he died a millionaire in today’s terms.
Other men and women of courage, conviction and destiny have made a difference: Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Booker T. Washington, Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner.
Today America is in need of such sons and daughters, born of virtue, courage and conviction to take the smallest action. They need to vote.
Many see that the United States is drifting towards the edge of ruination. At the helm is a president who happens to preside over our moral and economic collapse while pressing on relentlessly with the left-wing agenda. Same-sex marriages, illegal aliens, an under-employed America and a potential $19 trillion deficit do not bode well for our future and this country’s stability.
Barack Hussein Obama has met with numerous world leaders, many of them not so friendly to this country, either then or now.
Yet, in his adopted home city of Chicago, where gangland shootings take place regularly, where body bags fill up, by the hour, where black on black crime runs rampant, this president has yet to seriously address the issue.
As the first black president, he could have met these gang leaders at a presidential sponsored summit to appeal to them on a personal level, and to impress upon them how dangerous and detrimental their life of crime is impacting their own neighborhoods in a negative way.
How bad is it in Chicago? Just over the Fourth of July weekend of this year, alone, 10 people were killed and 55 wounded by gunfire. Shootings rose by about 40 percent during the first three months of this year, according to March statistics released by Chicago Police Department. The mayor, Rahm Emanuel, seems clueless on how to decrease these figures.
Make no mistake; this is largely black on black crime. Yet, when a white person, or a white cop, kills a black anywhere in America, the president cannot get to the podium fast enough to denounce it; neither can race baiters such as Jackson and Sharpton.
This is when the clueless come out with signs chanting “Black Lives Matter.” They ignore the subject of innocent black fetuses being aborted, thanks largely to the efforts of Planned Parenthood Founder Margaret Sanger and uninformed blacks who work for and support this organization.
Though serving his last year in office, the president has opted to focus on, and press for, immigration reform. This is an agenda that will further impact the black community in a negative way in terms of employment opportunity.
African-Americans who have achieved higher-education degrees, a key investment leading to the middle class, still find themselves more likely to face long-term unemployment than their white, Hispanic and Asian counterparts, according to the Center for Popular Democracy.
Some believe the president’s end game is granting amnesty for over 30 million illegals and resettling hundreds of thousands of Muslims here in the United States. Not surprisingly, his party supports this president’s efforts while the Republican leadership does not.
And the Supreme Court — they have been missing in action for the past three years when it comes to defending, preserving and upholding the United States Constitution and the laws of the land.
So you ask, What can we do about it?
Americans can express their dismay and anger by voting in the next primary and election. Only then can we make a difference. History has shown that one man can effect positive change. Conservatives in this country number around 45 million strong, so if all would step up and vote, there’s immense power in those numbers.
Up until now, politicians, Sunday morning news pundits and Washington bureaucrats have an open microphone to sway voters, thanks to 24-hour news programs.
It’s time for Americans to really listen to what is being said and recognizing what is unrealistic, not sell low-information voters a bad bill-of-goods.
Forbes writes (We’ve Crossed The Tipping Point; Most Americans Now Receive Government Benefits):
..perhaps 52 percent of U.S. households—more than half—now receive benefits from the government, thanks to President Obama. And Mr. Entitlement is just getting started. If Obamacare is not repealed millions more will join the swelling rolls of those dependent on government handouts.
Conservatives have long dreaded the day when the U.S. crossed the halfway mark because of all the implications for individual and fiscal responsibility. As Benjamin Franklin reportedly said, “When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.” They learned that from the 2008 election and turned out in big numbers again in 2012.
One popular agenda being pushed by Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton is free college tuition – Bernie wants it at every academic institution, Clinton is calling for free public colleges.
Remember what Franklin said above:
“When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.”
And college tuition is off the charts, most can agree. So maybe free college tuition is a great idea; however, no one is explaining who is going to pay for the professor’s salary, buildings, campus maintenance, food, books and the necessary technology infrastructure necessary to support a child seeking the college experience.
Look at the reasons parents choose private over public schools. They want a better eduction, higher test scores, smaller class size and more. If parents see that many [not all] public schools fail their children, why would we want to see college follow that same model?
And how many of those students taking that free college will be looking not for education but a continuation of the high school experience and a delay of entering the work force. College should be something a student works for with grades, service participation, sports and learning to be a well-rounded person – a lesson that begins in the home.
Now it is our turn to voice our opinions at the ballot box, for conservatives, independents and libertarians to band together to make a difference in saving this republic. Even if the person presented by the GOP is not the person you want over others,
…we still need to vote for the party otherwise, liberals and progressives continue to rule the day.
The path will not always be smooth and easy. Most things worthwhile ever are. Just remember this.
As former military men, George Washington fought the good fight, Andrew Jackson fought the good fight, Ulysses S. Grant fought the good fight and Theodore Roosevelt fought the good fight while serving in the armed forces.
Professional military leaders such as Adm. Chester Nimitz and Gen. George S. Patton fought the good fight, as well, and all of these men did it against overwhelming odds and all of them prevailed.
Some say, and truly believe, that the American political system is rigged, that the powers that be, like powerful fathom puppet masters, have often manipulated the results of elections so that it does not matter what the voter does, they still pull the strings.
It doesn’t matter who the president is when Valerie Jarrett is pulling the strings.
There is some truth in every urban legend, but it will take voters to weed out these myths and uproot these puppet masters and make the necessary changes to insure the integrity of our political system and our republic. We must all make a stand.
This is a nation with a history of breeding courageous fighters, and right now America needs fighters.
The next generation is counting on you showing up at the polls. including your children and grandchildren. Your decision to get involved and vote will impact their future in many ways.
That is why now is the time America. Not next time, but now!
Unless conservatives from all corners vote to change the ownership of the White House, there may not be a next opportunity to save America.
Source: Communities Digital News
Why Are Homeowners Being Jailed for Demanding Wall Street Prosecutions?
A two-day long housing protest outside the Department of Justice this week has resulted in nearly 30 arrests and...
A two-day long housing protest outside the Department of Justice this week has resulted in nearly 30 arrests and several instances of law enforcement unnecessarily using tasers on activists, according to eye-witnesses. The action – which was organized by a coalition of housing advocacy groups, including the Home Defenders League and Occupy Our Homes – called for Attorney General Eric Holder to begin prosecutions against the bankers who created the foreclosure crisis.
"Everyone here is fed up with Holder acknowledging big banks did really bad stuff but [saying] they're too big to jail," says Greg Basta, deputy director of New York Communities for Change, who helped organize the event. Holder has previously suggested that prosecuting large banks would be difficult because it could destabilize the economy. The attorney general recently tried to walk those comments back – but the conspicuous lack of criminal prosecutions of bankers tells another story, one that Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi has written about extensively.
Alexis Goldstein, a former Wall Street employee and current Occupy Wall Street activist who was also at the event on Monday, agrees. "I want Eric Holder to uphold the rule of law, regardless of how much power the criminal has," says Goldstein. She says the lack of criminal prosecutions has created a "culture of immunity" that only gets further entrenched by the small settlements that banks now consider a cost of doing business. "There's no risk," she says, adding that the DOJ is effectively "incentivizing breaking the law."
Around 400 homeowners and 100 supporters took part in Monday's actions outside the DOJ, according to Basta. One of them was Vera Johnson, of Seattle. "I've been dealing with foreclosure issues for three years," says Johnson, just minutes after being released from the jail where she was held for over 24 hours for participating in this peaceful protest. Bank of America recently granted Johnson a loan modification after the media picked up on a Change.org petition that she started to save her home; this reprieve turned out to be a time bomb, as her rates were set to return to their original levels after four years. It's an all too common story, and Johnson went to Washington, D.C. to "join in solidarity" with others in similar situations.
Many of this week's protesters have been black and Latino homeowners, who were hit particularly hard by the foreclosure crisis. Mildred Garrison-Obi – a black woman from Stone Mountain, Georgia – was evicted from her home in 2012, though with the help of Occupy Our Homes she was able to return to it after four months of facing homelessness. "It was devastating," says Garrison-Obi, who was arrested today in a related action held outside of a law firm where Holder was once a partner. "But I'm not alone."
Activists note with dismay that the government has been significantly harder on people who stage nonviolent demonstrations against Wall Street than it has on the crooked bankers responsible for the housing crisis. Goldstein and Basta both say they witnessed law enforcement using tasers on multiple protesters this week. Johnson says that several hours before her arrest, as she and others sat on planter boxes outside the DOJ, a Department of Homeland Security officer asked, "Do you want to get arrested?" and then, "Do you want to get tased?" Later, when she refused to unlock her arms with another protester after three warnings – hardly a violent act or a threat to public safety – she says she was tased from behind on her left arm. She turned around to see the same officer, who she recalls telling her, "That's what you get."
Carmen Pittman, an activist with Occupy Our Homes in Atlanta, suffered similar treatment at this week's protests. In video footage of her arrest, Pittman appears to have her arms interlocked with another protester.
Lawyers familiar with police codes of conduct note that this kind of passive resistance generally does not meet the official standards for when an officer can use a taser. "In a study of regulations around tasers, the National Institute of Justice found that most police departments do not allow taser use against someone who 'nonviolently refuses' a police command," says NYU law professor Sarah Knuckey, who co-authored a report on the suppression of the rights of Occupy activists. "The incident needs to be thoroughly investigated, there must be a public accounting of what happened and why, and any wrong-doing must be punished."
A spokesperson for the Washington, D.C. police department directed requests for comment to the Federal Protective Service, part of the Department of Homeland Security. Scott McConnell, an FPS spokesperson, said that "a number of individuals" had "breached a security barricade after repeated warnings to leave the area" and that there had been 27 arrests as of Tuesday morning; he declined to comment on the video of Pittman getting tased or on FPS's taser policy generally.
Monday and Tuesday's actions came as the DOJ falls under increasing criticism for its investigations of journalists – first seizing records that cover dozens of Associated Press reporters, and now targeting Fox News' James Rosen. Many media observers have found the Rosen case especially troubling, due to the fact that he was investigated under the theory that he engaged in a conspiracy with Stephen Kim – his source – to leak government information. This is the same theory that U.S. officials have used to go after Wikileaks, and if applied more widely, it would effectively criminalize the basic act of investigative reporting. Some see the Obama DOJ's war on whistleblowers and leakers – and now journalists – less as a means of protecting national security than a way to crack down on who controls information.
As journalists start to get the feeling that their profession is under attack by Obama's DOJ, that department is saying something entirely different – though just as clearly – to the nation's financial elite. "The message," says Goldstein, "is that you can get away with anything."
Soure:
Celebs, supporters of Dream Act face off with anti-DACA protesters
For many DREAMERS, or undocumented young immigrants fighting to stay in the country, their battle could depend a lot on...
For many DREAMERS, or undocumented young immigrants fighting to stay in the country, their battle could depend a lot on what happens in the next few weeks in Congress.
Supporters and protestors of those DREAMERS clashed in West LA Wednesday in front of Senator Feinstein's office.
Read the full article here.
6 days ago
6 days ago