JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon is sticking with Team Trump
PMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is sticking with President Trump. Presiding at the U.S. banking giant's annual...
PMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is sticking with President Trump.
Presiding at the U.S. banking giant's annual shareholder meeting Tuesday, Dimon got an earful from investors who criticized JPMorgan's support of the new White House administration and asked whether he would step down from Trump's business advisory council.
Read the full article here.
These Activists Marched From Charlottesville To D.C. To Let Everyone Know That 'White Supremacy Is Real'
These Activists Marched From Charlottesville To D.C. To Let Everyone Know That 'White Supremacy Is Real'
We previously reported that a coalition of activists were planning a 10-day march from Charlottesville to D.C. called...
We previously reported that a coalition of activists were planning a 10-day march from Charlottesville to D.C. called The March to Confront White Supremacy.
Well, the march has been successfully completed!
Read the full article here.
Education Department Releases List of Federally Funded Charter Schools, Though Incomplete
The U.S. Department of Education has released a list of the charter schools that have received federal funding since...
The U.S. Department of Education has released a list of the charter schools that have received federal funding since 2006.
The move comes in the wake of requests by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), dating back to 2014, for public disclosure of who had received federal taxpayer money. CMD had submitted requests for this and related information to the Department and several states.
In October 2015, CMD released its report "Charter School Black Hole: CMD Special Investigation Reveals Huge Info Gap on Charter School Spending," discussing the more than $3.7 billion dollars the federal government had spent on charters and the gaps in what the public could see about which charters received taxpayer money.
Two months later, the Department of Education issued a news release on the subject, titled "A Commitment to Transparency: Learning More about the Charter School Program." The data was released to the public on the eve of Christmas Eve.
According to the Department, "The dataset provides new and more detailed information on the over $1.5 billion that CSP [the Charter School Program] has provided, since 2006, to fund the start-up, replication, and expansion" of charters.
It includes information on which grant program funded each of the charter schools listed and how much. That is more information than the public has ever been given about the true reach of the CSP program into their communities, fueled by federal tax dollars.
It lists more 4,831 charter school with the amounts received in that period, but it does not indicate which of them closed. CMD has sought to assess the number of closed charters using other data as a proxy but ambiguities have impeded that effort.
In its December release, the agency noted that more than half of the charter schools in its list of nearly 5,000 were "operational" as of the last school year with complete data: "CSP planning and startup capital facilitated the creation of over 2,600 charter schools that were operational as of SY 2013-14; approximately 430 charter schools that served students but subsequently closed by SY 2013-14; and approximately 699 'prospective schools.'”
The fate of each of the more than 2,000 charter schools in the difference between 4,831 and 2,600 is not definitively known, although CMD's initial analysis indicates that far more than 430 charters have closed over the past two decades. The agency has not released a complete list of closed charters that received federal funds and how much.
The dataset also does not go back to the beginning of federal charter school funding in 1993, though it does cover the more recent period CMD sought information about. Accordingly, the dataset does not include all the charter schools that received federal tax monies but closed since the inception of the federal charter school program.
The list released in December also did not include the names of "prospective schools" that received federal funds but never opened, which CMD has called "ghost" schools- as with the 25 it found that never opened in Michigan in 2011 and 2012 but that received at least $1,7 million dollars, according to a state expenditure report.
So on January 13, 2016, CMD filed a new set of open records requests with the Department of Education asking that it fill in those gaps and also provide information about communications regarding closed charters and prospective charters.
This is part of a long-term investigation of charter schools that CMD started nearly five years ago.
In 2011, CMD began examining the close relationship between charter school businesses and legislators after a whistleblower provided it with all of the bills secretly voted on through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) where corporate lobbyists vote as equals with lawmakers on bills that are then pushed into law in statehouses across the country.
That award-winning investigation shed new light on an industry that had grown from an "experiment" in 1992 (in Minnesota) into an influential network with a league of federal and state lobbyists seeking increasing redistribution of funds from traditional public schools to other entities under the watchword of "choice."
Over the past nearly five years, CMD has documented the impact of the policies on American school children, despite the PR claims of the industry, which has an increasing number of allies within education agencies who are devoted to charter expansion at the expense of traditional public schools. CMD has written about numerous aspects of the charter school industry as well as corporations, non-profit groups, and policymakers involved in the effort to privatize public schools in numerous ways. CMD has also documented how budget difficulties following the Wall Street meltdown under George W. Bush have been seized on by some in the industry as opportunities to try to displace school boards and local democratic control of schools and spending. CMD has also documented how billionaire funders of ALEC, such as the Koch brothers, have pushed their hostility toward the idea of public schools under the guise of choice.
In 2014, CMD sought to determine how much money the federal government had spent on charters, through State Education Agencies (SEAs) or Charter Management Organizations (CMOs) or other vehicles and discovered that this information was not publicly available. Instead, key data about how Americans' tax dollars were being spent on the charter school experiment and its failures was largely hidden from public view.
When CMD sought the identities of the charter authorizers or CMOs that had been essentially designated via ALEC bills to determine which charters were eligible to receive federal funds, the feds suggested asking the CMOs, even though many of them are private entities not covered by Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) rules or state open records laws.
CMD was told to ask NACSA, the National Association of Charter School Associations, a private group created as a result of this new industry, but NACSA also did not maintain a public list of all the charters that had received federal funding and how much each had received.
Additionally, the states through their SEAs - where pro-charter staffers work within state education departments - varied greatly in how much information was provided to the public about which charters had received funds and how that taxpayer money had been spent - despite mounting news accounts of fraud and waste by charters, including numerous criminal indictments, as tallied at more than $200 million by the Center for Popular Democracy.
Under ALEC-style charter bills, charters were exempted from most state regulations including key financial reporting and controls, and a number of charters refused requests by the press under open records laws for such information.
Although some charters were managed by school districts, many were not, and with this deregulation has emerged an array of questionable practices, such as "public" or non-profit charters that outsource their administration to for-profit firms - in addition to the advent of for-profit charters, like K12's "virtual schools," another conduit for redistributing taxpayer dollars through yet another ALEC bill.
When CMD sought information on how much money had even been spent on charters, no one knew. So CMD calculated the figure the federal government has spent fueling the charter school industry and the current tally stands at more than $3.7 billion.
But, that revealing figure did not provide the public with the information it has a right to know about where all that money actually went, as noted in CMD's report "Charter School Black Hole."
So CMD requested information about which charters received such funds and how much.
In releasing the new dataset, the Department of Education is providing new transparency about charter school grantees, although significant gaps remain.
Source: Truthout
ABQ call center workers get more family-friendly workplace rules
More than workers at Albuquerque’s T-Mobile call center began working under new workplace rules this week. The company...
More than workers at Albuquerque’s T-Mobile call center began working under new workplace rules this week. The company has been under increasing pressure to modify work rules to give workers greater flexibility to balance family and work requirements.
The company operates a nationwide call center near Jefferson and Menaul in Albuquerque and recently announced plans to add more employees top the more than 1,500 local workers already employed at the site.
News of the new workplace rules came from the Communications Workers of America which has been leading efforts with local organizations for these changes:
For Immediate Release July 2, 2015
Public Pressure Pushes T-Mobile US to Provide Fairer Paid Parental Leave Policy
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Responding to growing public pressure and local government initiatives, T-Mobile US announced this week that it would be adopt a paid parental leave program. The company also said it would end an oppressive policy that required call center workers to be on the phone 96.5% of their work time, leaving them with virtually no time for follow up on customer issues or to make changes in customers’ accounts as needed.
This is great news for workers who often must struggle to balance family and career. It comes as workers at T-Mobile US and a coalition of community supporters in cities like Albuquerque, N.M., step up efforts to restore a fair workweek and achieve other improvements for workers.
Members of TU, the union of T-Mobile workers, the Communications Workers of America and many organizations, including the Center for Popular Democracy, OLÉ and other coalition partners, have been raising concerns about unfair scheduling and other issues for workers at T-Mobile US and other employers. Workers want a voice in the decisions that affect them in their workplace — not just the ones that the company selectively picks and chooses. That’s why T-Mobile US workers are joining TU.
T-Mobile US’s initial scheduling changes were made just as the Albuquerque City Council was moving forward to consider a proposal to implement paid sick leave and scheduling improvements. The Albuquerque coalition hosted a town hall meeting on irregular scheduling, where Albuquerque City Council members pledged to support their fight for a fair workweek including the right to take sick leave without retaliation.
A recent National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) decision found T-Mobile guilty of engaging in illegal employment policies that prevented workers from even talking to each other about problems on the job. The judge ordered the company to rescind those policies and inform all 46,000 employees about the verdict.
Parental leave is a good first step toward helping workers balance their career and family responsibilities. But workers want real bargaining rights and the right to fairly choose union representation. That’s what T-Mobile must realize.
Source: The New Mexico Political Report
Fed Chair Janet Yellen: Slowdown in job market likely ‘transitory’
Fed Chair Janet Yellen: Slowdown in job market likely ‘transitory’
Federal Reserve Board Chair Janet L. Yellen expressed hope Tuesday morning that the slowdown in the U.S. job market...
Federal Reserve Board Chair Janet L. Yellen expressed hope Tuesday morning that the slowdown in the U.S. job market would prove temporary, but she emphasized that the central bank would be cautious in raising interest rates again.
Yellen, testifying before the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, acknowledged that hiring has dropped off sharply in recent months, but she also pointed to early signs that wages are beginning to rise after years of stagnation. She said she is "optimistic" that the progress in employment will continue.
"We believe that will turn around, expect it to turn around, but we are taking a cautious approach … to make sure that expectation is borne out," Yellen told lawmakers.
The Fed is responsible for charting the course for the nation’s economy, with the dual mission to keep prices stable and strengthen employment. It does that by adjusting the influential federal funds rate. A higher rate helps curb inflation by making borrowing money more expensive, which discourages spending and investment and reins in economic growth. A lower rate means that money is cheap, stimulating purchases by households and businesses. That helps boost employment and speeds up the economy.
The Fed chief's assessment comes less than a week after the Fed unanimously voted to leave its benchmark interest rate unchanged. The central bank raised rates in December for the first time since the Great Recession but has not done so again amid persistent concerns about the health of the global economy.
Yellen said Tuesday that there is still "considerable uncertainty" over her outlook, with such risks as slow growth at home, turbulence in China and volatility in financial markets.
The most immediate threat comes from across the Atlantic Ocean, where Britain will vote Thursday on whether to remain in the European Union. A decision to exit — popularly known as Brexit — would upend Britain's four-decade partnership with the continent and throw the future of Europe’s open market into doubt.
Already, the British pound has been on a roller coaster as the probability of departure shifts with each poll. International policymakers have warned that a decision to leave would lower economic growth in the country by more than 5 percent over the next three years and potentially ripple across the rest of the world.
"A U.K. vote to exit the European Union could have significant economic repercussions," Yellen said Tuesday.
In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the Fed slashed its target rate all the way to zero and pumped trillions of dollars into the economy in a bid to bolster the American recovery. More than seven years later, it is finally in the process of withdrawing that support.
The first move was in December, when the Fed nudged its target rate up to a range of 0.25 to 0.5 percent. At the time, officials anticipated raising rates four times this year, but the uncertainty in the global economy has forced them to downgrade that projection. Most Fed officials now think only two rate hikes are warranted this year, and a growing number think only one will be necessary.
That shift in thinking at the central bank is evident in Yellen’s own statements. Just last month, she had signaled that the central bank could raise rates "probably in the coming months." But Yellen dropped the reference in a speech early this month, after disappointing government data showed employers added just 38,000 jobs in May. And last week, she told reporters that she is "not comfortable to say it's in the next meeting or two."
On Tuesday, Yellen made the case for caution. Because rates are already so low, the Fed has limited room to reduce them further if the economy were to weaken, she said. Moving gradually also gives the central bank time to assess whether its forecast of continued economic improvement will come true.
"Our cautious approach to adjusting monetary policy remains appropriate," she said.
The Fed has faced criticism from both the left and the right recently over its governance. Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), chairman of the Banking Committee, opened the hearing Tuesday by calling on the Fed to follow more stringent rules for setting policy and to explain when it deviates.
"The desire to preserve the Fed’s independence, however, should not preclude consideration of additional measures to increase the transparency of the board’s actions," he said.
Meanwhile, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) focused on diversity within the Fed’s top ranks. Last month, more than 100 lawmakers sent a letter to Yellen arguing for more minority representation among its leadership.
The central bank is led by a board of governors based in Washington and 12 regional bank presidents scattered throughout the country. The governors are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, but regional bank leaders are chosen by local boards of directors.
Those officials tend to be white men. Yellen is the first woman to serve as chair in the central bank’s 101-year history. Only three Fed governors have been African American, and there have been no black regional bank presidents. No one now in the top brass is Hispanic.
By Ylan Q. Mui
Source
Critics Lining Up Against Charlotte’s Proposed City ID
Charlotte Observer - July 6, 2014, by Mark Price - The creation of an official Charlotte ID card is still only a...
Charlotte Observer - July 6, 2014, by Mark Price - The creation of an official Charlotte ID card is still only a proposal, but critics are already lining up, including a national political action group that claims the city’s plan will “aid and abet illegal immigrants.”
Two immigration reform groups – the national Americans for Legal Immigration PAC and NC Listen – say they will press North Carolina legislators to stop cities from creating IDs, which are of most benefit to people who don’t have Social Security numbers.
In Charlotte, that population is made up largely of immigrants of all nationalities who are not in the country legally. They can’t get a Social Security number or apply for a driver’s license, and they are subject to arrest and deportation.
About a half-dozen U.S. cities have already created municipal IDs, which experts see as a way of dealing locally with immigration issues that aren’t being solved on a national level.
Charlotte, like many of those other cities, has an immigrant population that is outpacing the growth rate of both whites and blacks, leading to entire neighborhoods and schools where foreign-born people are in the majority.
City leaders say that accepting them as residents is a practical matter. However, the ID proposal remains controversial and critics question whether it’s legal.
“It’s against federal law to aid and abet people in the country illegally and if this isn’t aiding and abetting, I don’t know what is,” said Ron Woodard of NC Listen.
William Gheen of Americans for Legal Immigration PAC is more blunt. “We will ask the General Assembly to stop any North Carolina city from helping illegal immigrants,” he said.
Charlotte Mayor Dan Clodfelter met with the city’s Immigrant Integration Task Force last month and asked the group to research a city ID program that can be used by all citizens to access community services.
The task force was created to craft policies that will make Charlotte more welcoming to immigrants of all nationalities, particularly those interested in starting businesses.
Recommendations – including whether to adopt a municipal ID program – are scheduled to be presented to the City Council in February.
Background checks at school
The idea of creating a city ID emerged in response to complaints from undocumented immigrant parents that they can’t interact with their own children in school classrooms.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools requires a Social Security number so it can do criminal background checks daily on people who want to do volunteer work in schools. The district recently announced a team is exploring alternative forms of identification that can be used to perform those criminal background checks. It may complete its work later this year.
CMS is independent from city government and would not be required to accept a municipal ID.
Still, Clodfelter said he hoped the new ID might help undocumented parents gain greater access to schools.
“This is a question for the entire community,” Clodfelter said in a statement. “The city, county, school system, law enforcement, community based nonprofits and other agencies need to work together on a review of the options to explore what may be feasible at the local level.”
Hector Vaca of the immigrant advocacy group ActionNC says he has doubts a city ID could be easily used for criminal background checks. To do that, he says the city would have to share ID card specifics with state and federal law enforcement databases – and that’s not necessarily something undocumented immigrants want to see happen.
ActionNC supports municipal IDs, he said, but is waiting to see what Charlotte leaders propose.
“This is another way to identify people, which is something even the police have said would be a good thing,” Vaca said. “I think it’s contradictory when anti-immigrant groups say we need to better identify the people who are in this country, and yet when you give them another tool that helps identify people, those critics say they don’t want it.”
Uses for municipal IDs
The Immigrant Integration Task Force intends to study municipal IDs created by other cities, including a program adopted last month by New York City. That program, which goes into effect at the end of the year, allows any New Yorker, “regardless of immigration status,” to get a government-issued photo identification card from the city. The cards are predicted to cost about $10 per person.
Proponents of such programs say the IDs can accomplish a lot of good, including making communities safer.
A study by the Center for Popular Democracy notes that immigrants who don’t have IDs are often unable to open bank accounts, which makes them easy targets for thieves. Such immigrants are also reluctant to report crimes and/or to visit doctors for conditions that might pose a community health threat, the report says.
Charlotte police say the IDs could also be useful in identifying victims of crimes.
Emily Tucker of Center for Popular Democracy says criticism of ID programs is often based on a mistaken belief that it is all about helping undocumented immigrants. In New York, city leaders are negotiating with museums, sports venues, businesses and banks to have benefits associated with city ID cards.
“Undocumented people may have been the inspiration initially, but I think it undercuts that effectiveness of (winning support for) the card,” she said.
“In New York, we decided to market it to a cross section of New Yorkers, including the LGBT community, homeless advocates, and even the American Civil Liberties Union, which wanted a form of ID with privacy protections: Something people wouldn’t be afraid to apply for.”
Source
Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2014/07/06/5025949/critics-lining-up-ag...
Editorial: Automatic signup gets more voters to polls
Among millennials, voter turnout in Illinois ranks 47th in the country, according to the political advocacy group...
Among millennials, voter turnout in Illinois ranks 47th in the country, according to the political advocacy group Common Cause. In the 2014 primary election, their turnout in Chicago wards was as low as 9 percent.
We don’t have to settle for such low numbers.
Illinois should look to Oregon and California, which recently approved automatic voter registration. Oregon did it in March and California OKd it just a week ago.
Under automatic voter registration, people are automatically registered when they get or update a driver’s license or state identification card. An opt-out provision is included for people who don’t want to register.
Illinois has 9.7 million residents who are eligible to vote, but 2.1 million of them are not registered, state Sen. Andy Manar, D-Decatur, said last week at a meeting of the Senate Executive Subcommittee.
Automatically adding unregistered people to the voting rolls could drive up voter turnout. It also would help county clerks by automatically updating voter addresses when people move and update their driver’s licenses. The Center for Popular Democracy estimates that nationwide automatic voter registration system would add 56 million voters to the rolls.
Cook County Clerk David Orr argues government has a responsibility to use technology to improve the voting process.
“Nowadays the burden should be on the government,” Orr says.
Exactly.
Source: Chicago Sun-Times
The Spy Who Fired Me
Harpers Magazine - March 2015, by Esther Kaplan - Last March, Jim Cramer, the host of CNBC’s Mad Money, devoted part of...
Harpers Magazine - March 2015, by Esther Kaplan - Last March, Jim Cramer, the host of CNBC’s Mad Money, devoted part of his show to a company called Cornerstone OnDemand. Cornerstone, Cramer shouted at the camera, is “a cloud-based-software-as-a-service play” in the “talent-management” field. Companies that use its platform can quickly assess an employee’s performance by analyzing his or her online interactions, including emails, instant messages, and Web use. “We’ve been managing people exactly the same way for the last hundred and fifty years,” Cornerstone’s CEO, Adam Miller, told Cramer. With the rise of the global workforce, the remote workforce, the smartphone and the tablet, it’s time to “manage people differently.” Clients include Virgin Media, Barclays, and Starwood Hotels.
Cornerstone, as Miller likes to tell investors, is positioning itself to be “on the vanguard of big data in the cloud” and a leader in the “gamification of performance management.” To be assessed by Cornerstone is to have your collaborative partnerships scored as assets and your brainstorms rewarded with electronic badges (genius idea!). It is to have scads of information swept up about what you do each day, whom you communicate with, and what you communicate about. Cornerstone converts that data into metrics to be factored in to your performance reviews and decisions about how much you’ll be paid.
Miller’s company is part of an $11 billion industry that also includes workforcemanagement systems such as Kronos and “enterprise social” platforms such as Microsoft’s Yammer, Salesforce’s Chatter, and, soon, Facebook at Work. Every aspect of an office worker’s life can now be measured, and an increasing number of corporations and institutions—from cosmetics companies to car-rental agencies—are using that informationto make hiring and firing decisions. Cramer, for one, is bullish on the idea: investing in companies like Cornerstone, he said, “can make you boatloads of money literally year after year!”
A survey from the American Management Association found that 66 percent of employers monitor the Internet use of their employees, 45 percent track employee keystrokes, and 43 percent monitor employee email. Only two states, Delaware and Connecticut, require companies to inform their employees that such monitoring is taking place. According to Marc Smith, a sociologist with the Social Media Research Foundation, “Anythingyou do with a piece of hardware that’s provided to you by the employer, every keystroke, is the property of the employer. Personal calls, private photos—if you put it on the company laptop, your company owns it. They may analyze any electronic record at any time for any purpose. It’s not your data.”
With the advent of wireless connectivity, along with a steep drop in the price of computer processors, electronic sensors, GPS devices, and radio-frequency identification tags, monitoring has become commonplace.Many retail workers now clock in with a thumb scan. Nurses wear badges that track how often they wash their hands. Warehouse workers carry devices that assign them their next task and give them a time by which they must complete it. Some may soon be outfitted with augmented-reality devices to more efficiently locate products.
In industry after industry, this data collection is part of an expensive, high-tech effort to squeeze every last drop of productivity from corporate workforces, an effort that pushes employees to their mental, emotional, and physical limits; claims control over their working and nonworking hours; and compensates them as little as possible, even at the risk of violating labor laws. In some cases, these new systems produce impressive results for the bottom line: after Unified Grocers, a large wholesaler, implemented an electronic tasking system for its warehouse workers, the firm was able to cut payroll expenses by 25 percent while increasing sales by 36 percent. A 2013 study of five chain restaurants found that electronic monitoring decreased employee theft and increased hourly sales. In other cases, however, the return on investment isn’t so clear. As one Cornerstonereport says of corporate social-networking tools.“ There is no generally accepted model for their implementation or standard set of metrics for measuring R.O.I.” Yet this has hardly slowed adoption.
Read the full article here.
Why the Federal Reserve is due for a radical reinvention
Why the Federal Reserve is due for a radical reinvention
The Federal Reserve is a hot topic in the news these days. Usually, the stories revolve around the merits of its...
The Federal Reserve is a hot topic in the news these days. Usually, the stories revolve around the merits of its decisions: Was quantitative easing a good idea? Should it raise interest rates again in April? But Andrew Levin, a Dartmouth economist and former aide to Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, thinks our questions need to go much deeper.
On Monday, Levin and the activist campaign Fed Up proposed four major reforms that would radically alter the structure of the Federal Reserve. The reason they cite is compellingly simple: How the Fed works is basically out of whack with what it does today.
The Federal Reserve began around a century ago as a decentralized and private institution aimed at avoiding financial panics and making sure the interactions between the nation's for-profit banks remained stable. Since then, it's basically become a kind of government agency, with a fundamental role in shaping the American economy and the supply of wages and jobs for everyday workers. But the design and governance of the Fed has not kept up with that shift in responsibilities.
To understand why, let's start at the very beginning. Western economies began creating central banks several centuries ago as modern capitalism was first coming into focus, to serve as a "lender of last resort." Private banks could go and borrow from the central bank when times were tight — even if was just for a few days — and that would quell potential financial panics and bank runs. As a result, central banks were generally created by government charters, but as private corporations whose shares were owned by the banks that borrowed from them. "When the Bank of England and some other major central banks were founded, they were viewed as mostly providing services to commercial banks," as Levin explained to The Week.
America's Federal Reserve was created in 1913 under very similar circumstances. A potential financial crisis in 1907 was averted only when J.P. Morgan stepped in to backstop the country's private banks with his own personal fortune. No one wanted a repeat of that, so the Fed was created. It's actually a system of 12 regions, each overseen by a Fed branch bank — there's one in Dallas, in Richmond, in New York City, and so forth — with the private banks owning the shares of whatever Fed bank oversees their region.
More importantly, each regional Fed bank is run by a board of nine directors, six of whom are appointed by the private banking industry. The other three are appointed by the Federal Reserve system's national Board of Governors — a seven-member group appointed by the U.S. president and confirmed by the Senate. Together, the directors appoint a president to run their particular regional bank, rather like a CEO and a corporate board: They set the president's salary, review his or her performance, etc. All nine used to do that, but Dodd-Frank reformed the system in 2010 so that three of the six governors appointed by the private banks no longer play a role in selecting the president.
Over the course of the 20th Century, various developments like the end of the gold standard and the creation of federal deposit insurance diluted the importance of the regional banks as lenders of last resort. At the same time, however, the regional banks found themselves owning large amounts of financial instruments as a result of serving that role. So they created a joint national group to manage all those holdings called the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), and over time it grew in importance. Its decisions are determined by 12 votes: the seven members of the Board of Governors, plus five of the 12 regional presidents. (The 12 presidents rotate through the voting positions, while the other seven sit in on the FOMC but don't vote.)
Today, when we talk about the Fed setting interest rates or meeting to decide monetary policy — which in turn decides the rate of wage growth and the supply of jobs throughout the entire national economy — we're talking about the FOMC. "For all practical purposes, the Federal Reserve today is a public enterprise," Levin said. "It's serving the public. It's making nationally critical decisions."
The problem is the Federal Reserve system was originally conceived of and designed as an add-on to the private banking industry, and that design has remained even as the nature and responsibilities of the Fed have change enormously: "This whole rationale that made perfect sense in 1913 doesn't make sense anymore," Levin said. The result is an institution that, while of enormous import to the public good, is incredibly complex, opaque, and governed with comparatively little input from everyday Americans.
"The Fed, in order to be effective, has to have the confidence of the public," Levin said. But allowing the banks to hold such enormous sway over the decision-making of the institution tasked with both setting national interest rates and regulating the financial system undermines that confidence. Economist Dean Baker analogized it to "reserving seats on the Federal Communications Commission’s board for the cable television industry." Levin himself likened it to allowing criminal attorneys or defense lawyers to select the director of the FBI and set his or her salary and performance review.
So Levin has put forward four major reforms. They're broad, and the details for how they could play out are negotiable, but they're aimed at starting a conversation around the topic.
One is to eliminate private ownership of shares in the Federal Reserve system and make it fully public, but more importantly to completely reform how the nine directors of each regional bank are appointed. This could involve reducing the number of directors, but mostly it would involve selecting them all via the same process, one that brings in all aspects of the community — small businesses, community groups, unions, non-profits, etc. In particular, directors should not come from institutions — i.e. private banks and financial entities — that the Fed system is tasked with overseeing.
The next step would be to make the process by which the nine directors for each region select their president public and transparent. As Ady Barkan, the campaign director for Fed Up, pointed out in a press call, when all 12 regional president slots were up for replacement in February, all 12 were quietly and opaquely re-appointed — even after the Fed Up campaign pressed Fed officials to lay out a system by which the public could participate. The ones for Dallas, Minneapolis, and Philadelphia were all previously associated with Goldman Sachs. St. Louis Federal Reserve President James Bullard once told Barkan that, "To call the reappointment process pro forma would be an understatement."
Third would be to set term limits for Fed officials. Make them long enough to insulate those officials from political pressure. But don't allow them to serve multiple terms one after the other as they can now.
And finally, apply the same transparency standards to the Fed that are applied to other government agencies: Allow the Government Accountability Office to publish an annual review of all the Fed's operations and policies, and make sure both the Fed's Inspector General and the Freedom of Information Act apply to the 12 regional banks as well as the national Board of Governors.
"What I've proposed is something that seems incremental, workable, and helpful," Levin concluded. And despite arguments over whether the Fed is making the right choices in the here and now about things like interest rates, Levin's goal is much bigger: to make the Fed a healthy functioning member of our democracy long after the current economic situation — and whatever particular monetary policy stance it calls for — has passed.
"These reforms are to improve governance, accountability and transparency," Levin said. "We live in a democracy — and the government is supposed to serve the public."
By Jeff Spross
Source
New York City Increases Its Resistance to Federal Entreaties on Foreign-Born Detainees
The New York Times - December 5, 2013, by Kirk Semple - For years, New York City correction officials routinely...
The New York Times - December 5, 2013, by Kirk Semple - For years, New York City correction officials routinely provided federal immigration authorities with information about foreign-born detainees in their custody. The city, in response to federal requests, would transfer many of those detainees into federal custody, often leading to their deportation.
But a series of laws passed by the City Council over the past two years sought to restrict this cooperative agreement.
And according to new city statistics, the laws appear to be achieving their goal, prompting celebration — albeit guarded — among immigrants’ advocates.
From July, when the most recent of the restrictive laws went into effect, to September, city officials responded to 904 federal hold requests, known as detainers, according to the statistics. Of those detainers, the city declined to honor 331, or 37 percent.
In contrast, until the laws were passed, the city customarily honored every detainer, according to city officials.
“We feel good about the impact that this legislation has had because it has stopped the deportation of a lot of New Yorkers,” Javier H. Valdes, co-executive director of Make the Road New York, an advocacy group, said on Thursday.
“Our hope,” he said, “is that with the new administration we can increase the number of New Yorkers who will not be turned over to immigration.”
Even with the new city laws, New York’s restrictions are still not as tight as those of other major cities, like Chicago and Washington, advocates said.
Cooperation between local governments and federal immigration authorities has been a deeply contentious issue around the United States.
Some jurisdictions, convinced that the federal government has not done enough to enforce immigration laws, have increased their role in immigration enforcement. But others, concerned about the impact of deportations on their communities, have tried to put distance between themselves and the immigration machinery of the federal government.
Much of the recent debate has surrounded the federal Secure Communities program. The initiative allows Homeland Security officials to more easily compare the fingerprints of every suspect booked at a local jail with those in its files. If they find that a suspect is a noncitizen who is in the country illegally or has a criminal record, they may issue a detainer.
The Secure Communities program, a cornerstone of the Obama administration’s immigration enforcement strategy, has been vehemently opposed by some elected officials around the country, who have sought to limit their jurisdictions’ participation.
In November 2011, the City Council passed a law that narrowed the range of detainers the city would honor. Among other terms, the law prevented correction officers from transferring immigrants to federal custody if the inmates had no convictions or outstanding warrants, had not previously been deported, were not suspected gang members or did not appear on a terrorist watch list.
The effect on the detainer system was immediate: Correction officials went from routinely honoring all detainers to, according to the recently released statistics, about 75 percent of them.
In February, the Council imposed additional restrictions, including blocking detainers for immigrants facing all but the most serious misdemeanor charges, like sexual abuse, assault and gun possession.
Under these new guidelines, the percentage of detainers the city rebuffed rose to about 37 percent from about 25 percent. The rates may have even been higher had the federal government not concurrently altered its own detainer policy, limiting the range of immigrants it would seek custody of.
Still, immigrant advocates said they would press for more restrictions and have reoriented their lobby toward Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio, who has vowed to end the city’s cooperation with federal immigration detainers except for detainees convicted of “violent or serious felonies.”
Newark, San Francisco and Santa Clara, Calif., are also among the cities that have more restrictive detainer policies than New York, according to Emily Tucker, staff attorney at the Center for Popular Democracy, an advocacy group in New York.
“New York City can do much better than these numbers show we are doing at the moment,” she said.
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