Progressive Activists Protest For A Cause You Should Hear More About, But Won't
More than a dozen community activists picketed the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia this week, protesting what they...
More than a dozen community activists picketed the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia this week, protesting what they say is the bank president’s refusal to meet with them to discuss how Fed monetary policy affects real people.
The roughly 15 activists are members of ACTION United, an organization representing low-income people of color in Philadelphia. ACTION United is affiliated with the national Fed Up campaign, a coalition of progressive groups advocating Fed monetary policies that prioritize full employment and shared economic prosperity.
Fed Up and ACTION United planned Tuesday's protest because they say that Philadelphia Fed President Patrick Harker reneged on a promise to meet, and allow group members to give him a tour of low-income neighborhoods where they are active. The activists point to a video in which Harker appears to commit to the meeting in a conversation with ACTION United organizer Kendra Brooks at the annual Jackson Hole symposium in August.
When Brooks followed up, Theresa Singleton, the Philadelphia Fed’s vice president and community affairs officer, said in an email obtained by HuffPost that a meeting was not in the cards, because the bank is reluctant to work with “just one organization."
Instead, Singleton invited Brooks to Tuesday’s community development briefing for low- and moderate-income community stakeholders. Singleton also said Fed staff would “design and organize” their own community tour.
That response rankled Fed Up and ACTION United members. The Federal Reserve has a dozen regional banks, and the activists have met or have planned meetings with all of the regional Fed leaders except Philadelphia's since the campaign began in August 2014. They want a meeting -- and they want it to take place in an economically distressed community of color -- not in the Fed’s offices.
So they decided to pressure the Philadelphia Fed with a protest, featuring Fed Up’s trademark “What recovery?” signs and green "Whose Recovery?" T-shirts.
ACTION United also sent Brooks to the community development briefing, where she and several nonprofit executives and bankers who work with low- and moderate-income earners spoke with Harker and Singleton.
Brooks said she was mostly pleased with what she heard from Harker and other Fed officials, who she said sounded genuinely committed to researching the conditions in communities the Fed serves and finding ways to improve “economic autonomy” in the Philadelphia region.
“The outcome of the meeting was much better than we anticipated, but going in, we did not know the information that we knew coming out.” Brooks said. “We hope he will continue to keep the doors open for organizations like ours and our coalition. And that we will continue to be a part of that conversation and not excluded.”
But Brooks noted that the Fed officials did not discuss how monetary policy and the Fed’s adjustment of interest rates disproportionately affects low-income workers and communities of color.
For the Fed Up campaign, the exclusion of monetary policy reaffirms that nothing short of a meeting between Harker and activists will suffice.
“We appreciate and accept the invitation to discuss community development and research, but this is not a substitute for the promise President Harker made to Fed Up,” said Shawn Sebastian, a policy advocate and staff attorney for the Fed Up campaign. “President Harker promised to speak with working families in the black neighborhoods of Philadelphia about their experiences -- where unemployment is double white unemployment. Harker promised to discuss how his monetary policy decisions can build a true full employment economy that works for everyone.”
Philadelphia Fed spokeswoman Marilyn Wimp, in an email to HuffPost, didn't address a question about whether Harker reneged on his promise to meet with protesters. She instead pointed to Tuesday's briefing as evidence of Harker's interest in reaching out to diverse parts of the community.
But the list of the Tuesday briefing’s attendees reveals that Brooks was the only stakeholder from a group with a position on Fed interest rates.
Crafting monetary policy is a main responsibility of the Federal Reserve regional banks. Regional Fed presidents occupy five of the 12 seats on the Federal Open Market Committee, responsible for adjusting the Fed’s benchmark interest rates. Lately, they have accounted for half of the committee’s votes, because the Senate has failed to approve presidential nominees for two of the seven seats reserved for members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in Washington.
The FOMC keeps its benchmark interest rates low when it is more concerned about full employment, and raises them to curb excessive inflation when the economy has grown enough to drive up prices.
Fed Up wants the central bank to maintain current low interest rates for the near term, which will allow economic demand to continue to grow, benefitting workers with more jobs and higher wages. The campaign applauded the Fed’s decision to leave rates unchanged in September.
But Fed Up leaders said they're worried about the Philadelphia Fed and the role its president may play in future monetary policy decisions. The Philadelphia region's previous Fed president, Charles Plosser, who left the post in March, was an outspoken inflation hawk.
Harker, who will serve a one-year term on the FOMC in 2017, was a member of the Philadelphia Fed board’s search committee for a new president, recusing himself once he became a candidate.
Harker’s views on monetary policy are not yet known. He is a former trustee of the Goldman Sachs Trust, which Sebastian and other Fed Up critics said they worry will make him more sympathetic to financial institutions' concerns about inflation.
Source: Huffington Post
What Does Jeff Flake's Vote Mean? Brett Kavanaugh Is Still in the Running, For Now
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What Does Jeff Flake's Vote Mean? Brett Kavanaugh Is Still in the Running, For Now
If you were tuned into the Judiciary Committee hearing on Friday afternoon, you may have witnessed a confusing moment:...
If you were tuned into the Judiciary Committee hearing on Friday afternoon, you may have witnessed a confusing moment: Hours after Senator Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican, announced in a statement that he would vote to confirm Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, he showed up late to the vote and then asked for a delay on the Senate floor vote, pending an FBI investigation. A quick vote along the roll call occurred...and then the hearing was abruptly adjourned.
Read the full article here.
How cities are bypassing states to explore registering hundreds of thousands to vote
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How cities are bypassing states to explore registering hundreds of thousands to vote
National groups, in search of voting rights laws that could be pursued in Republican-controlled states, have taken...
National groups, in search of voting rights laws that could be pursued in Republican-controlled states, have taken notice of the potential for city-by-city reforms. The Center for Popular Democracy, a national progressive group connected to advocacy organizations in 38 states, issued a report Friday geared toward educating potential partners on what voting reforms cities can pursue.
Read the full article here.
May Day March in NYC to Call Out Trump Agenda
NEW YORK - A number of people were arrested Monday in Manhattan during an event for May Day, also known as...
NEW YORK - A number of people were arrested Monday in Manhattan during an event for May Day, also known as International Workers Day.
May Day is traditionally a day of activism for worker and immigrant rights groups.
A dozen protesters were taken into custody when they refused to move away from the entrance at the Midtown headquarters of JP Morgan Chase.
Read full article here.
The dollar is ticking down
“Jerome Powell’s most important qualification is that he served with Janet Yellen. His confirmation should depend on...
“Jerome Powell’s most important qualification is that he served with Janet Yellen. His confirmation should depend on his willingness to follow in Yellen’s footsteps on both monetary and regulatory policy,” Shawn Sebastian, co-director of Fed Up, a campaign from the Center for Popular Democracy, told the Washington Post.
Southern Cities Are Passing Paid Sick Leave—But Republicans Won’t Let Them Have It
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Southern Cities Are Passing Paid Sick Leave—But Republicans Won’t Let Them Have It
Texas advocates for paid sick leave haven’t given up hope, however. They plan to wield the sheer amount of popular...
Texas advocates for paid sick leave haven’t given up hope, however. They plan to wield the sheer amount of popular support for these ordinances in their favor and against the state politicians who block them. “Our state leadership is out of touch with what the majority of Texans believe and want for their communities,” says Michelle Tremillo, executive director of the Texas Organizing Project, a community organizing group behind the paid sick leave ordinance.
Read the full article here.
Progressives Do Not Take The Fed Seriously. Meet The People Trying To Change That
Progressive activists have no shortage of ambitious economic policy goals. They include the $15 minimum wage, Social...
Progressive activists have no shortage of ambitious economic policy goals. They include the $15 minimum wage, Social Security expansion, Medicare for all and debt-free college -- to name just a few.
One item not on the list? Federal Reserve policy to create jobs and boost wages.
But a growing number of liberal-leaning economists and a new, Fed policy-centered coalition of progressive groups are trying to change that. They are on a mission to keep the Federal Reserve from raising interest rates until the economy sees real wage growth. It is a cause that they argue is essential to raising living standards and reducing income inequality, and they are making their case in policy papers, meetings with Federal Reserve officials and yes, even demonstrations. They believe that President Barack Obama has neglected the Fed -- even failing to fill two vacant seatson the Federal Reserve Board of Governors -- to the detriment of paychecks around the country.
The progressive economists and activists merely recognize what Wall Street has long accepted as true: The Fed’s monetary policy is one of if not the most important single factors in the real economy. In that battle to guide Fed policy, Wall Street is joined bythe GOP, which routinely pressures the Fed to rein itself in.
The degree to which the Fed turns the faucet of money on or off has a direct effect on the jobs available to Americans -- and the wages they are able to demand once they are working. In fact, slowing wage growth is a feature of Fed policy, not a bug. A decision to limit the flow of money, even if based on sound concerns about inflation, is designed to lower prices by putting thousands of Americans out of work and driving down wage growth.
Janet Yellen, a liberal-leaning economist who has long focused on wage growth, runs the Fed. Progressives successfully championed her for the post, derailing the bid of Obama’s top pick of Larry Summers, yet there has barely been a peep from them as Yellen and her colleagues consider putting the brakes on the economy.
To understand the case the progressives are making, it's important to know a little bit about the Fed, how it works and why it matters so much to the American economy.
How Does The Fed Work?
In controlling the country’s money supply, the Federal Reserve System, more commonly known as the “Fed,” is charged with what is often called a “dual mandate”: maximizing employment and maintaining stable prices. It does this primarily by adjusting the Federal Funds Rate, which is the interest rate at which banks lend to one another overnight using funds kept at the Federal Reserve. (It also can adjust theDiscount Rate, which is the rate at which the Fed lends to banks directly.) The Fed body responsible for adjusting the rate is the Federal Open Market Committee, which consists of 12 members -- seven presidentially appointed Federal Reserve Board governors, including the chair of the Fed, and a rotating group of five regional Federal Reserve Bank presidents.
How the Fed chooses to adjust the money supply is what is known as monetary policy. In a weak economy, the Fed is inclined to engage in monetary stimulus, which means lowering rates to prompt a virtuous cycle of economic growth. Banks respond to the cheaper credit available to them by providing cheaper credit to consumers and businesses. Consumers benefit from lower interest rates on home mortgages, cars and student loans. Businesses get lower interest rates on the loans they need to pay employees, maintain inventory and pay other bills. The money consumers and business owners save on financing their debt then gets cycled back into the economy in demand for goods and services. This in turn stimulates hiring, lowering unemployment and ultimately raising wages as employers compete for workers.
If economic growth gets higher than the Fed believes is consistent with its inflation target, the Fed contracts the money supply, raising rates to prevent excessive inflation. That is because if debt remains cheap, wages could grow so high that businesses must constantly raise prices to remain afloat. People’s financial assets decline in value, as does the purchasing power of workers’ wages. The Fed adjusts rates with a target of 2 percent inflation, in an effort to avoid levels of inflation that would “reduce the public's ability to make accurate longer-term economic and financial decisions.”
While the 2 percent target has become sacred in Fed policy circles, it is based on no more evidence than any other figure -- and those other figures, such as target unemployment, are adjusted routinely. Taking some of the halo off the 2 percent number, some economists argue, would give the Fed much more flexibility to help workers.
What is often lost in the dry, bloodless discussion of raising rates is the consequences for regular people when the Fed moves in that direction. The goal of raising rates -- not an unfortunate, unintended consequence, but the actual policy goal -- is to throw people out of work and drive down wages. As people suffer, as their confidence is weakened, as their sense of dignity is undermined, they become meeker in the job market and as a result they stop pushing for a raise, or they accept a new position at a lower salary. With wages suppressed, companies don’t need to raise prices in order to continue growing profits, and the pressure on inflation is alleviated.
The Fed, liberal economists say, is planning to cause all of this pain with precious little evidence that it is even remotely necessary. Despite years of steady economic growth and rising employment, prices remain well below the Fed's inflation target.
There is, in fact, no evidence of much price inflation at all.
So Why Cause Needless Suffering?
The degree to which the Fed has emphasized employment and wages, versus the threat of inflation, has varied greatly over the decades based both on its leadership and economic circumstances. Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, notes in his book The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive, that starting in 1980, the Fed shifted its monetary policy in favor of the anti-inflation prong of its dual mandate at the expense of full employment. Paul Volcker, Fed chair from 1979 to 1987, increased interest rates to wipe out high inflation, allowing the unemployment rate to reach almost 11 percent in 1982. Since then, the Fed has shifted its monetary policies modestly based on circumstances. But with rare exception, it has not allowed unemployment to get low enough to generate significant wage growth for the large majority of American workers.
The severity of the recent recession yielded an unusually broad consensus in favor of keeping rates low. Since 2008, under both the Republican-appointed Fed chair, Ben Bernanke, and the current Democrat-appointed chair, Yellen, the federal funds rate has remained at what is known as the “zero lower bound” – between 0 and 0.25 percent. In fact, the Fed went even further, purchasing trillions in securities between 2008 and 2014, in a program known as quantitative easing. The aim of the program was to keep credit flowing by maintaining high demand for public and private debt.
Now, after positive GDP growth in 19 of the last 21 quarters since 2011 and the official unemployment rate nearing 5 percent, Yellen has indicated that the Fed will soon raise the rate. How much to raise the rate -- and when the Fed will do that -- is unclear. Unemployment remained flat from March to April, which may make the Fed more cautious. The next fed committee meeting is June 16-17, and the results of the meeting will be watched closely.
What Would Progressive Fed Policy Look Like?
Baker and other economists think the Fed should allow wages to grow more substantially before raising rates.
Josh Bivens, research and policy director of the Economic Policy Institute, argues in an August 2014 fact sheet that the Fed should look for 3.5 percent growth. In the first quarter of 2015, wages were up 2.6 percent from the year before -- a growth rate that many economists say doesn't have a real impact on regular people's lives.
Jared Bernstein, senior fellow at the Center on Budget & Policy Priorities and former economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, shared Bivens’ preference for the Fed to wait for 3.5 percent nominal wage growth before raising the rate.
“The unemployment rate is within distance of [the Fed's full employment target], and yet inflation and wage pressures are nowhere to be seen,” Bernstein said. “My admonitions here are not to slow the economy down too soon, and that would be until GDP growth reaches workers through their paychecks.”
In short, these economists want Yellen to act more like Chair Alan Greenspan did in the late 1990s. At the time, Greenspan repeatedly declined to raise rates, claiming that the “softness in compensation growth” continued to make employment a greater concern than inflation. In doing so, Greenspan faced down criticism both from the financial industry and dissent from Fed committee members like Yellen, then the Fed governor.
The result of Greenspan’s decision, many argue, was one of the few periods of broadly distributed wage growth since before the 1973 recession. From 1995 to 2000, the bottom 20 percent of workers saw double-digit wage increases.
It is an odd turn considering that Greenspan’s handling of the dot-com and housing bubbles, and libertarian ideology, have made him a bête noire of the left.
“A lot of economists do not like to acknowledge it, but Greenspan -- and I have trashed him endlessly -- was not an orthodox economist,” Dean Baker said. “Greenspan did something nobody thought was right, and he was right. High school degree workers were getting pay raises. It was not Clinton, but Greenspan who did it.”
These economists believe that postponing a rate hike is risk-free, because price inflation has remained defiantly low for so long. From April 2014 to April 2015, personal consumption expenditures excluding food and energy -- the metric the Fed uses to measure inflation -- went up just over 1 percent, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. That level of price inflation occurred during a period in which the economy created nearly 2.8 million more jobs, bringing the official unemployment rate from 6.2 percent to 5.4 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In the long term, Bivens and Baker would like to see the Fed be altogether more concerned about wages and employment than inflation. They believe that the Fed’s price inflation target could go higher than 2 percent without tolerating dangerous inflation rates. A higher inflation target would have allowed the Fed to pursue a more aggressive quantitative easing program and push wages upward faster.
Baker says that the Fed should be most concerned about the rate at which prices are inflating, rather than a particular percentage range. And he believes that an uptick in inflation is rarely so abrupt as to be beyond adjustment.
“If we had a jump in inflation even from 1.5 percent to 2 percent and then 2.5 the next month, then I’d say we should hit on the brakes,” Baker said.
Other economists from major world financial bodies, like Olivier Blanchard of the International Monetary Fund and Eric Rosengren of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, have also publicly endorsed higher inflation targets.
More conservative economists argue that even if prices remain stable and low, a rate hike would head off asset inflation in, for example, the housing and stock markets. Mark Calabria, director of financial regulation studies at the Cato Institute, expressed concern that the Fed’s low interest rates have allowed financial asset prices and corporate leveraging to reach “disconcerting” levels.
The liberal economists share Calabria’s concerns about asset bubbles, but believe that the Fed has tools other than raising interest rates at its disposal to address them.They note that the Fed has the power to regulate the banks and other commercial institutions with which it does business.
The Fed, they say, also has a bully pulpit that can be used to dampen the excessive expectations of growth in a particular industry that lead assets to be overvalued. A July 2014 Monetary Policy Report by the Fed Board of Governors warned against high asset prices in the social media and biotechnology industries.
“For whatever reason, [Yellen] has not done it since,” said Baker of the Fed’s July 2014 cautionary remarks. “If you show the evidence that these are overpriced, it will have an impact on prices.”
How’s The Economy Doing?
Yellen has been a consistent advocate of monetary stimulus, keeping rates low and buying financial assets. As chair, Yellen has adopted a consensus-driven approach to her leadership, including listening to some more inflation-wary members of the Fed committee.
Baker estimates that a sustained series of rate hikes would reduce the economic growth rate by half a percentage point, and the economy would create 500,000 fewer jobs per year.
The low official unemployment rate hides the fact that millions of Americans have settled for part-time work or dropped out of the labor force entirely. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that when counting workers employed part-time for economic reasons, and those who have not looked for a job recently due to discouragement, the unemployment rate was 11.6 percent from the middle of 2014 through the beginning of 2015. Tellingly, despite the creation of 2.8 million jobs from April 2014 to April 2015, labor force participation remained flat at 62.8 percent.
Several small business owners who spoke to The Huffington Post also expressed concern about the fragile state of the recovery, and warned against a premature rate hike.
Mike Brey, CEO of Hobby Works, which has several retail locations in Maryland and Virginia, said that business only began to rebound in the latter half of 2014. Hobby Works employs 38 people. Brey recently rehired a worker for Hobby Works’ warehouse location, and plans to hire another employee if sales continue to pick up.
“I feel like we are in a recovery, but it has taken pretty long to get here,” Brey said. “To me, it still feels a little bit uneasy.”
Brey says the lower that Fed rates are, the better terms he gets on bulk purchases from wholesalers. A single quarter-point rate hike would probably not affect what Hobby Works does on a “day-to-day basis,” he says. Rather, he is more worried about the effects of a rate hike on the still-precarious consumer confidence of the lower-middle and middle-class consumers who frequent his stores.
Ron Nelsen, owner of Pioneer Door, a retail garage door company in Las Vegas, says that garage door sales have increased as consumers have begun buying homes in large numbers again.
“I think true consumer demand has been here for a year or two,” Nelsen said. “Maybe the end of 2013 and last year really felt like people were opening up their pockets again.”
Nelsen worried that a Fed rate hike could hurt the consumers who buy his company’s garage doors.
“If it affected my customers’ base disposable income, it would be huge,” he said.
Mobilizing Main Street -- and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard
Having ideas about what the Fed should do is one thing, and actually influencing the Fed’s decisions is another thing entirely. It is unclear exactly how to change a Fed decision, but it undoubtedly takes more than the public comments of a few economists.
Fed Up, a new coalition of community organizations and labor unions led by theCenter for Popular Democracy, is trying to turn the complex policy arguments of economists like Baker, Bivens and Bernstein into a grassroots political movement. The goal is to get the Fed to recommit itself to genuine, equitable full employment policies. In particular, Fed Up, whose main concern is aptly summed up by its homepage whatrecovery.org, has mobilized urban communities of color to lobby the Fed for pro-employment monetary policies that account for the disproportionately high unemployment and economic hardship levels in their communities.
Ady Barkan, a Center for Popular Democracy staff member who directs the Fed Up campaign, said that while Fed policy is more difficult to explain to community activists than issues like the minimum wage and Medicaid access, the coalition has made headway in educating people about the importance of the Fed to their daily lives.
“We have developed materials explaining why the Fed matters and why higher interest rates could hurt you,” Barkan said. “It is not just that it will mean higher mortgage rates, car rates and student loan rates, but that when the economy slows down, workers have less leverage. We are finding that people are excited by it and recognize why it matters to them.”
Fed Up released a study in March, "Wall Street, Main Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard: Why African Americans Must Not Be Left Out of the Federal Reserve’s Full-Employment Mandate," highlighting the still-high unemployment rate among black Americans, and lopsided impact of the Great Recession on black wealth and wages. In 2014, the study reports, black unemployment remained at 11.4 percent, while it was 5.3 percent for whites.
The study notes that even prior to the recession, African-Americans were losing ground economically. The median black worker suffered a 3.1 percent wage cut from 2000 to 2014, the study says, compared to a 2.5 percent increase for the median white worker. Between 2007 and 2013, median household wealth declined 43 percent among African-Americans, compared with 27 percent for whites.
In addition to calling on the Fed to postpone any planned rate hikes, Fed Up is asking for structural reforms that would broaden its mandate and subject it to greater influence from working people. It wants the Fed to study the effects of inequality and how non-monetary policies like the minimum wage affect the economy. It recommends making the selection of regional Fed presidents more transparent and open to public input. And it is demanding that Fed officials meet regularly with working people and community organizations.
Fed Up organized press conferences in eight cities with regional Federal Reserve banks in March to publicize the study’s findings about racial disparities in wages and employment. In November, Fed Up activists met with Yellen, Vice Chair Stanley Fischer, and Governors Lael Brainerd and Jerome Powell in Washington.
Barkan believes the Fed governors were receptive to Fed Up’s stance.
“They listened very carefully and asked good follow-up questions and seemed to be really moved and grateful for the conversation,” Barkan said.
While Fed Up has convened meetings and published reports, it has not shied away from public protests. In what the Wall Street Journal called “a first for Jackson Hole,”Fed Up sent a group to protest a possible rate hike at the Fed’s annual Jackson Hole, Wyoming, meeting in August 2014. The protests yielded a meeting between the group and Kansas City Fed President Esther George. Fed Up says it has scheduled additional meetings with regional Fed presidents.
Lobbying the Fed is a delicate task because it is seen as novel -- even subversive. The Fed has traditionally been viewed as a nonpartisan, technocratic institution that should be left to its own devices by politicians and political movements.
But progressive advocates argue that the Fed has not always been impartial. Regional Fed presidents and Fed governors routinely survey business and financial leaders to help make interest rate decisions. And the mere fact that regional Fed presidents are largely elected by private bankers, these progressives say, means that the financial community has an outsize say in Fed policy.
“What central bank independence has really meant is independence from all sectors except the financial sector,” Bivens said. “Organized labor? Of course they should not be allowed to have a voice at the central bank, but the financial sector does.”
What's more, progressives note, the political right has wasted no time heaping criticism on the Fed for what it perceives as excessive stimulus. And attacking the Fed has not just been a campaign trope for tea party-friendly presidential candidates like Rick Perry. Congressional Republicans regularly pressure Yellen, too. In an April hearing, Rep. Scott Garrett (R-N.J.), a member of the House Financial Services Committee, complained to Yellen that the Fed was supposed to check Congress’ desire for looser monetary policy, but now Congress found itself trying to check the Fed.
A couple months before that, Garrett questioned Yellen about a speech she gave on economic inequality. He argued that the timing of the speech -- it was a few weeks before the 2014 midterm elections -- "clearly indicate[s] that the Fed is already acting and making decisions clearly on a partisan political basis."
“In recent years, [the Fed is] just getting criticized up and down from the right that they are priming the pump for hyperinflation,” Bivens said. “If the right is going to pressure them, pressure from the left is more important than ever.”
Source: Huffington Post
Supreme Court deadlocks on immigration case
Karla Cano faces uncertainty. She had expected to qualify for deferred action under the Obama administration’s...
Karla Cano faces uncertainty. She had expected to qualify for deferred action under the Obama administration’s executive orders on immigration. But a tied decision by the U.S. Supreme Court creates uncertainty for Cano and her family.
“All that is unjust about my situation will continue,” said Cano, 21, a senior at Mount Mary University and the mother of a 2-year-old son.
“I am in college so I can have a career helping others, but I cannot start a career like that without work authorization,” she said. “We just want to help this country and support our families like anyone else.”
The court on June 23 deadlocked on President Barack Obama’s executive actions taken to shield millions living in the United States from deportation.
The 4–4 tie means the next president and a new Congress will determine any change in U.S. immigration policy. The president said the court’s deadlock “takes us further from the country we aspire to be.”
Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee for president, called the court ruling unacceptable and pledged to “do everything possible under the law to go further to protect families.”
The dispute before the eight justices — the case was heard in April, after the death of Antonin Scalia — was over the legality of the administration’s orders creating “deferred action for parents of Americans and lawful permanent residents” or DAPA and expanding “deferred action for childhood arrivals” or DACA.
Basically the actions would have provided protection from deportation and three-year work permits to about 5 million undocumented parents of U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents, as well as undocumented people who came to the United States before the age of 16.
The president announced the orders in 2014 and, soon after, they were challenged by 26 states led by Republican governors, including Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.
Federal district and appeals courts sided with the states and said the executive office lacked the authority to issue orders shielding immigrants from deportation.
The high court tie means the appeals court ruling stands. But the ruling in United States v. Texas did not set any landmark standards in the dispute over immigration.
The U.S. Justice Department brought the case to the Supreme Court, seeking to overturn the appeals court decision.
The American Civil Liberties Union was among the many groups to file a friend-of-the-court brief in the case.
Cecillia Wang, director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said, the “4–4 tie has a profound impact on millions of American families whose lives will remain in limbo and who will now continue the fight. In setting the DAPA guidelines, President Obama exercised the same prosecutorial discretion his predecessors have wielded without controversy and ultimately the courts should hold that the action was lawful.”
Reaction from the U.S. progressive community was swift and compassionate.
“This split decision deals a severe blow to millions of immigrant families who have already been waiting more than 18 months for the DAPA and DACA programs to be implemented,” said Alianza Americas’ executive director Oscar Chacón. “The cold fact is that millions of parents and children will go to bed tonight knowing once again that their families could be torn apart at any moment.”
At the Center for Popular Democracy, co-executive director Ana Maria Archila said, “If the highest court in the land cannot find a majority for justice and compassion, there is something truly broken in our system of laws, checks and balances.”
In Wisconsin, Voces de la Frontera held news conferences in Green Bay, Madison and in Milwaukee. LULAC, Centro Hispano and the Southside Organizing Committee also were involved.
“This is very sad for me,” said Jose Flores, a factory worker, father of four and also the president of Voces de la Frontera. “I have been waiting and fighting for reform like DAPA for years. But we are not giving up. I refuse ... to shrink back into the shadows.”
Cano, a member of Voces de la Frontera, said, “I am not giving up on the struggle. We need more people to get involved in the upcoming elections, because this decision shows the importance of both the presidential and U.S. congressional elections and whom the next president will nominate to the U.S. Supreme Court.”
BY LISA NEFF
Source
The United Cities of America: What Seattle's Minimum-Wage Deal Means
The Atlantic - May 2, 2014, by Eric Liu - On Wednesday, a Senate...
The Atlantic - May 2, 2014, by Eric Liu - On Wednesday, a Senate filibuster blocked President Obama’s proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10. Then on Thursday, Mayor Ed Murray of Seattle announced a business-labor deal to raise the city minimum wage to $15.
Procedurally, these two things had nothing to do with each other. Substantively, Seattle’s action is a direct result of the Senate’s inaction—and it portends the acceleration of two trends in public policy today: a growing willingness to reckon with radical inequality and wage stagnation, and the emergence of networked localism as a strategy for political action.
Let’s first unpack what happened in Seattle. The mayor appointed a committee of citizens to develop a proposal for $15. I was a member of that task force, which included union leaders and businesspeople and nonprofit heads and chamber-of-commerce chiefs. We gathered data. We commissioned studies. We held a big public symposium. Negotiations were complex and often heated and the committee missed its deadline, but we eventually got a deal that won the support of 21 of 24 members.
The grassroots “$15 Now” activists who helped propel a socialist to the city council and helped put this issue on the map last year are unsatisfied with the number of years and the accommodations. They aim to go to the ballot directly with a plan that’s closer to, well, $15 now. And the city council still must vote to enact this or any plan, and may come under pressure to amend it many ways.
The deal is nobody’s picture of perfect. It’s a compromise. It phases in minimum-wage hikes so that an employer has to get to $15 in three years (for businesses with more than 500 employees), four years (same, but offering healthcare), or seven years (for businesses with fewer than 500). The under-500 businesses also get several years to count a portion of worker tips and healthcare toward the wage requirements.
But pull back from the substantive details and the process hoops ahead. This is, as the vice president might say, a big f-ing deal. It’s not just the $15 figure, which sets the floor higher than in any other city or state. It’s the fact that a broad coalition with significant business support made it happen.
That makes this deal a model for other cities—and further evidence that norms are changing. It suggests that it’s becoming less acceptable in America to run a business in a way that relies on poverty wages. It’s becoming less acceptable to suggest that the go-to remedy for the pain of working people should be tax cuts for the wealthy. And though a minimum-wage increase is not an innovative tool, its revival is part of a widening repertoire of policy ideas for closing the opportunity gap.
We brought in leaders and experts from Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, New York—all cities that have raised the wage or taken steps to.
Perhaps more significantly, Seattle’s action shows we’re entering a new age of bypass. Washington is stuck and will be for the foreseeable future. So it falls increasingly to cities to act—and in increasingly coordinated ways. As the Seattle task force explored possible pathways to $15, we brought in elected leaders and experts from San Jose, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, New York, all cities that have raised the wage or taken steps to. We all shared tactics, policy proposals, lessons, and language.
Groups like Local Progress have emerged to link up politicians and policy entrepreneurs from disparate cities, not just on wages but also on criminal-justice reform, immigrant rights, voting rights, climate change, and other issues. The cities of the United States are beginning to web up into an archipelago of policy experimentation and problem-solving.
This networked localism is distinct from the mere downward distribution of national political dollars to local campaigns. It’s also distinct from the Koch brothers’ strategy of creating wholly owned political subsidiaries in small towns to push agendas. And it’s not just about having mayors who are skillful, important as that is. Networked localism is a form of citizenship from the middle out and the bottom up, where residents decide to act together and to learn in real time from their counterparts in other places.
Thus far, perhaps owing to the progressive tilt of big cities, networked localism seems to be practiced mainly by progressives. That may place a political limit on its ultimate reach. Another limit, of course, is structural: On most issues, even well-woven webs of cities cannot do what a well-run national government can. A $15 wage will directly benefit tens of thousands of low-income workers in my city. It does nothing for millions of others in my country.
Nevertheless, it’s safe to say that Seattle’s $15 moment is a sign of a shift in self-government. The last century rewarded political leaders like TR or LBJ who knew how to centralize the local into the national. This century may belong to those who can decentralize the national—but into a new kind of national. Call it the United Cities of America.
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The Activists Who Helped Shut Down Trump’s CEO Councils
The CEOs who made up two White House advisory councils have fled like rats on a sinking ship. Their exodus — a dramatic...
The CEOs who made up two White House advisory councils have fled like rats on a sinking ship. Their exodus — a dramatic rebuke of Donald Trump — came within 48 hours of the incendiary August 15 press conference where the President praised some of the participants of last week’s white supremacist rampage in Charlottesville, Virginia.
But many of the CEOs on these councils had been under heavy pressure to disavow Trump’s agenda of hate and racism even before Charlottesville. That pressure came from grassroots activists.
The Center for Popular Democracy, Make The Road New York, New York Communities for Change, and several other immigrant and worker advocates had led that activist campaign, targeting the leaders of nine major corporations affiliated with the Trump administration. The campaign, working through a web site called Corporate Backers of Hate, detailed the connections between the nine companies and the Trump administration and encouraged people to send emails to both the CEOs involved and members of their corporate boards.
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