A top regulator's close ties to Wall Street damage one of its most crucial functions 10 years after the crisis
A top regulator's close ties to Wall Street damage one of its most crucial functions 10 years after the crisis
“A new report from the Fed Up coalition, an activist group calling for more inclusive economic policies, says the key...
“A new report from the Fed Up coalition, an activist group calling for more inclusive economic policies, says the key regional Fed bank's conflicts lead to subpar regulation of Wall Street. As William Dudley, a former Goldman Sachs partner, prepares to retire as New York Fed president, Fed Up calls on the bank to "select a new president who will put the interests of the public before Wall Street. A new report from the Fed Up coalition, led by the Center for Popular Democracy, a Washington-based nonprofit, shows just how stark the lack of diversity in race, gender, and professional backgrounds has been at the New York Fed.”
Read the full article here.
Immigrant group targets Wells Fargo for supporting ‘Trump campaign of hate’
Immigrant group targets Wells Fargo for supporting ‘Trump campaign of hate’
Advocates for undocumented immigrants gathered outside 3 Wells Fargo Center in uptown Charlotte Wednesday to demand the...
Advocates for undocumented immigrants gathered outside 3 Wells Fargo Center in uptown Charlotte Wednesday to demand the bank cut all ties with companies that profit from deportations.
Hector Vaca of Action NC says the goal of the event is to get Wells Fargo to pull its money out of private prisons and immigrant detention centers. The protesters are also demanding the bank use its political influence to stop plans for a wall along the Mexican border.
Read the full article here.
Queens Radio Show Aims to Help Day Laborers Avoid Death or Injury on the Job
Queens Radio Show Aims to Help Day Laborers Avoid Death or Injury on the Job
As a muted telenovela played on a T.V. overhead, Jorge Roldan inched toward the microphone in a basement radio studio...
As a muted telenovela played on a T.V. overhead, Jorge Roldan inched toward the microphone in a basement radio studio in Corona, Queens.
Speaking in Spanish, Roldan, a coordinator at the Laborers’ International Union of North America who is based in Long Island City, reminded his audience, mainly construction workers, that their bosses are obligated to give them respirators when they work on jobs involving airborne contaminants like asbestos.
“New York is an old city – many buildings have asbestos,” he said. “Wash your clothes in two different machines. The asbestos resist everything.”
His advice was standard fare for Sin Fronteras. Since April, the hour-long program has brought together six Latinos weekly to offer advice on a delicate topic for the Latino immigrant community: the exploitation and mistreatment of undocumented laborers.
Translated “Without Frontiers,” the offering is the only public-affairs program of 91.9 Radio Impacto 2, an unlicensed Spanish-language music station founded in 2008 that caters to the Ecuadorian population. Sin Fronteras focuses on worker-safety issues, but also promotes cultural events in the Ecuadorian and Latino community. Its guests have included Queens Assemblyman Francisco Moya and Ecuadorian Consul General Linda Machuca, among other local leaders.
More than 98,000 Ecuadorians live in Queens. Latinos account for over 27 percent of the borough population and are a nearly equal percentage of the construction workers citywide, according to a 2015 report by the New York Committee for Operational Safety & Health, a labor advocacy group. An investigation in 2013 by the non-profit Center for Popular Democracy found that between 2003 to 2011, Latino and/or immigrant workers made up three quarters of fatal falls at construction sites in New York City.
“We don’t want more of our people to die,” said Sin Fronteras’ founder, Rosita Cali, an Ecuadorian immigrant who also co-directs Padres en Acción, an organization in Jackson Heights that offers workplace safety trainings sponsored by the Occupational Health and Safety Administration – known as “OSHA classes.”
“Workers have to protect themselves,” she said. “They have the right to say, ‘no, I’m not going to go on that ladder.’ They have a voice and a vote.”
Juan, a 28-year-old Ecuadorian construction worker, represents the people the program tries to reach. An undocumented immigrant, he said he has been a construction worker since March and makes $17 an hour, nearly one-third more than in his previous job working in a kitchen. But about two months ago, he said, he started feeling sick after working with fiberglass insulation in a building in Brooklyn.
Juan said he asked his construction supervisor for a mask, but was told that there were none available.
“They told us that there weren’t any, that we would have to wait,” said the worker, who asked that his last name not be published. “The day went by, and then the week. How can that be?”
By the end of the week, he said, he had an obstructed sense of smell, body aches and a cough, which his doctor attributed to inhalation of fiberglass.
“When you remove the insulation, the dust rises – even your skin starts to sting,” said Juan.
Christina Fox, the work center coordinator for New Immigrant Community Empowerment, a non-profit based in Jackson Heights, said the Latino laborers she works with often don’t report injuries to their supervisors. She explained that workers might not think their injuries are severe enough or don’t know that they have a right to receive compensation.
Attending a workplace safety class could change this.
“A worker will be able to go to their job, recognize there’s a crack in the retaining wall, stop, and tell their supervisor,” she said. “But low-income workers don’t [always] have the flexibility to leave the job. A lot of workers might enter that risk situation.”
It’s a scenario that Sin Fronteras aims to address. Cali began pushing for more workers’ rights classes several years ago. When she heard in 2013 that the Ecuadorian Consulate was running out of space to host OSHA classes, she offered up the basement of her jewelry store and barbershop in Corona – the same basement where her program is now recorded.
For two months, she said, dozens of immigrants flocked to her shop weekly to learn about their right to report workplace accidents, regardless of legal status.
“When I saw how huge and exaggerated the demand was, I said, ‘this can’t be – we’re going to hold classes in other places,'” recalled Cali.
She created Sin Fronteras to expand the outreach. Like the majority of the hosts on the program, she doesn’t have professional radio experience, but the station’s owners immediately liked the idea of a program that seeks to help the community. The six hosts on Sin Fronteras are all volunteers and include a lawyer who specializes in construction accidents and the founder of Padres en Acción, Ronaldo Bini, who speaks about public-safety measures.
“Because people lack knowledge, they aren’t prepared and lose the chance to build their lives,” said Cali. “We want people to listen to the radio programs and come here and take OSHA classes, scaffold classes for workers’ protection.”
Maria Fernanda Baquerizo, the community relations coordinator at New York’s Ecuadorian Consulate, said that labor abuse is prevalent in the largely undocumented Ecuadorian community in Queens.
“It’s very positive that our community, our immigrants, can listen to important information of where to receive help,” she said. “Because generally the people who are abused at work, the undocumented, think that their employers can abuse them and not pay them wages… Immigrants feel helpless, they feel alone. They don’t know how to move forward.”
By Leila Miller
Source
Hundreds march on Capitol Hill to call for a DACA replacement
Hundreds march on Capitol Hill to call for a DACA replacement
The Trump administration's decision to end the DACA program means thousands of undocumented individuals are on the...
The Trump administration's decision to end the DACA program means thousands of undocumented individuals are on the verge of being deported, despite having lived in the US for years. On Wednesday, protesters took to DC to call for the DREAM Act, which would build on DACA, creating a multi-phase process that would lead to permanent residency.
Read the full article here.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s Challenger Has a Chance
During the presidential primary, Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz has managed the...
During the presidential primary, Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz has managed the impressive feat of angering virtually every liberal in America. Bernie Sanders supporters think she displays a transparent biasfor Hillary Clinton. Party stalwarts, including Clinton fans, criticize the decision tohide primary debates on weekend nights, ceding hours of free media time to Republicans in the formative stages of the election. And in a recent interview with the New York Times Magazine, Wasserman Schultz insulted millennial women for being “complacent” about abortion rights. This is an incomplete list.
In two separate petitions, more than 94,000 people have demanded that Wasserman Schultz resign as DNC chair. But back in her district, in Hollywood, Florida, Timothy Canova has another idea: vote her out of office.
Last Thursday, Canova, a former aide to the late Sen. Paul Tsongas and a professor at Nova Southeastern University’s Shepard Broad College of Law, jumped into the Democratic primary in Florida’s 23rd congressional district. It’s Wasserman Schultz’s first primary challenge ever, and with frustration running high against her, it’s almost certain to draw national attention. But Canova first became interested in challenging Wasserman Schultz not because of her actions as DNC chair, but because of her record.
“This is the most liberal county in all of Florida,” Canova said in an interview, referring to Broward County, where most of Wasserman Schultz’s district resides (a small portion is in northern Miami-Dade County). But she more closely associates with her significant support from corporate donors, Canova argued. He listed several of Wasserman Schultz’s votes, such as blocking the SEC and IRS from disclosing corporate political spending (which was part of last month’s omnibus spending bill),opposing a medical marijuana ballot measure that got 58 percent of the vote in Florida, preventing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from regulating discrimination in auto lending and opposing their rules cracking down on payday lending, and supporting “fast track” authority for trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
“I think anyone who voted for fast track should be primaried. I believe that ordinary citizens have to step up,” Canova said.
Canova espouses many of the populist themes that attract the left: fighting corporate power, defending organized labor, and reducing income inequality. But this is not just a Bernie Sanders Democrat. You have to go back further. Tim Canova is a Marriner Eccles Democrat.
Eccles chaired the Federal Reserve during Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency. And Canova believes the central bank should revisit Eccles’s unorthodox strategies to jump-start a broad-based economic recovery. “In the 1930s, the regional Fed banks made loans directly to the people,” Canova said. “Instead of purchasing $4 trillion in Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities, [the Fed] could buy short-term municipal bonds and drive the yield to zero for state and local governments. They could push money into infrastructure, making loans to state infrastructure banks.” Canova has even suggested that the government create currency outside of the central bank, breaking their monopoly on the money supply, as President Abraham Lincoln did with the “Greenback” in the 1860s.
During World War II, FDR directed Eccles’s Fed to finance American war debt at low rates, eventually producing a stimulus that helped to end the Great Depression. It was a time when the Fed was far more accountable to democratically elected institutions, one that Canova looks back upon fondly. “People like to talk about the Fed’s independence, that’s really a cover for the Fed’s capture,” he said. “They look out for elite groups in society, and the hell with everybody else.”
A growing faction of progressives are beginning to return to their roots, asking whether Fed policies truly support the public interest. The Fed Up campaign, with which Canova has consulted, seeks to pressure the Fed to adopt pro-worker policies. A surprise movement in Congress just cut a 100 year-old subsidy the Fed handed out to banks by $7 billion. Even mainstream figures like economist Larry Summerswonder whether the Fed’s hybrid public/private structure, which critics believe makes it beholden to financial interests, makes sense.
Progressive debates on central banking are not as advanced here as in Europe, where British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn wants a “quantitative easing for people,” where the central bank injects money directly into the economy rather than filtering it through financial institutions. But Canova, who says his views were most influenced by an undergraduate economics professor who taught with one book—John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money—bridges this gap. Twenty years ago this week, he wrote an op-ed for the New York Timesopposing the reappointment of Alan Greenspan as Fed chair because of his support for high real interest rates. If elected this fall, he would instantly become the strongest advocate in Congress for a people’s Fed.
While Debbie Wasserman Schultz has few known views on the Federal Reserve, Canova’s populism offers a strong counterweight to her corporate-tinged philosophy. And even before that contrast plays out, the hunger for any challenge to Wasserman Schultz is palpable.
“The money is coming in more rapidly than believable,” said Howie Klein, co-founder of Blue America PAC, which raises money for progressive Democrats. Wasserman Schultz has been on Klein’s radar since she, as chair of the “Red to Blue” campaign for electing House Democrats, refused to campaign against three Republicans in Florida because of prior friendships and their joint support for the state sugar industry.
Klein sent a Blue America fundraising email shortly after Canova’s announcement, and raised $7,000 within 12 hours, and over $10,000 at last count. The intensity of support reached beyond the PAC’s traditional donor base. “Our average donation is $45, but in this case we’re getting $3, $5,” Klein said. “For people who our donors have never heard of, it can take three-four months to do that. It’s just because ofDebbie Wasserman Schultz.”
Similarly, Canova says he’s seeing tens of thousands of visits to his website andFacebook page, suggesting support beyond south Florida. However, he wants to localize rather than nationalize the race. The district, initially drawn with Wasserman Schultz’s input when she served in the Florida state Senate, is now more Hispanic and less reliable for a politician who Canova believes has lost touch with her constituents.
“You talk to people at the Broward County Democratic clubs, they say she takes us for granted,” Canova said. The political model for his campaign is David Brat, another academic who took on a party leader—then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor—and defeated him, on the grounds that Cantor ignored his district amid constant corporate fundraising.
If there’s one thing Wasserman Schultz can do, it’s raise money—that’s why she chairs the party. She will have a big cash advantage and the power of incumbency. But Canova thinks he can outmatch her by riding the populist tide. “There’s a tendency to get so down about the system, but this is an interesting moment we’re living in,” Canova said. “This is a grassroots movement. We’re tapping in without even trying yet.”
Source: The New Republic
Regional Feds’ Head-Hunting Under Scrutiny Over Insider Bias, Delays
New York/Washington. Efforts to fill top positions at some US Federal Reserve regional branches are casting a spotlight...
New York/Washington. Efforts to fill top positions at some US Federal Reserve regional branches are casting a spotlight on a decades-old process that critics say is opaque, favors insiders, and is ripe for reform.
Patrick Harker took the reins as president of the Philadelphia Fed this week, in an appointment that attracted scrutiny because he served on the committee of directors that interviewed other prospective candidates for the job he ultimately took.
The Dallas Fed has been without a permanent president for more than three months as that search process stretches well into its eighth month. And the Fed’s Minneapolis branch abruptly announced the departure of its leader, Narayana Kocherlakota, more than a year before he was due to go, with no replacement named to date.
The delays and reliance on Fed employees in picking regional Fed presidents can only embolden Republican Senator Richard Shelby to push harder for a makeover of the central bank’s structure, which has changed little in its 101 years.
A bill passed in May by the Senate Banking Committee that Shelby chairs would strip the New York Fed’s board of its power to appoint its presidents. And it could go further, given the bill would form a committee to consider a wholesale overhaul of the Fed’s structure of 12 districts, which has not changed through the decades of shifting US populations and an evolving economy.
The bill is part of a broader conservative effort to expose the central bank to more oversight, and some analysts saw the Philadelphia Fed’s choice as reinforcing the view that the Fed needs to open up more to outsiders.
Nine of 11 current regional presidents came from within the Fed, a proportion that has edged up over time. Twenty years ago, seven of 12 were insiders.
“The process seems to create a diverse set of candidates in which the insider is almost always accepted,” said Aaron Klein, director of a financial regulatory reform effort at the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Since it was created in 1913, the central bank’s decentralized structure was meant to check the power of Washington, where seven Fed governors with permanent votes on policy are appointed by the White House and approved by the Senate.
The 12 Fed presidents who are picked by their regional boards usually vote on policy every two or three years, and they tend to hold more diverse views.
Former Richmond Fed President Alfred Broaddus told Reuters the regional Fed chiefs have more freedom “to do and say things that may not be politically popular” because they are not politically appointed. “On the other hand, there is the question of legitimacy since they are appointed by local boards who are not elected.”
“Tone deaf”
Two-thirds of regional Fed directors are selected by local bankers, while the rest are appointed by the Fed’s Board of Governors in Washington.
Critics question how well those regional boards — mostly made of the heads of corporations and industry groups meant to represent the public — fulfill their mission.
Last year, a non-profit group representing labor unions and community leaders organized by the Center for Popular Democracy, urged the Fed’s Philadelphia and Dallas branches to make the selection of their presidents more transparent and to include a member of the public in the effort.
Philadelphia’s Fed in particular proved “tone deaf” in its head-hunting effort, said Lou Crandall, chief economist at Wrightson ICAP in Jersey City, New Jersey.
Harker was a Philadelphia Fed director when the board started looking to replace president Charles Plosser, who left on March 1, and he was among the six directors who interviewed more than a dozen short-listed candidates for the job, according to the Philadelphia Fed.
But on Feb. 18, Harker floated his own name, recused himself from the process and a week later his colleagues on the board unanimously appointed him as the new president.
While the selection follows Fed guidelines and was approved by its Board of Governors, it raised questions of transparency and fairness.
“The Philadelphia Fed’s search process might have made perfect sense in a corporate environment, but is obviously problematic for an official institution,” said Crandall.
The board’s chair and vice chair, Swathmore Group founder James Nevels and Michael Angelakis of Comcast Corp, respectively, declined to comment, as did Harker.
Peter Conti-Brown, an academic fellow at Stanford Law School’s Rock Center for Corporate Governance, and an expert witness at a Senate Banking Committee hearing this year, proposed to let the Fed Board appoint and fire regional Fed presidents or at least have a say in the selection process.
In the past, reform proposals for the 12 regional Fed banks have focused on decreasing or increasing their number and their governance.
Changes to the way the regional Fed bosses are chosen could strengthen the influence of lawmakers at the expense of regional interests.
For now, delays in appointments of new chiefs force regional banks to send relatively unknown deputies to debate monetary policy at meetings in Washington, as Dallas and Philadelphia did last month when the Fed considered raising interest rates for the first time in nearly a decade.
The Minneapolis Fed still has time to find a new president before Kocherlakota steps down at year end.
“For now the Fed criticism is just noise, mostly from Republicans,” said Greg Valliere, chief political strategist at Potomac Research Group. “But once the Fed begins to raise interest rates … then the left will weigh in as well.”
Source: Jakarta Globe
Advocates of minimum wage hike raise more than $1.4 million
Advocates of minimum wage hike raise more than $1.4 million
Proponents of hiking the state’s minimum wage have already collected more than $1.4 million to put the issue on the...
Proponents of hiking the state’s minimum wage have already collected more than $1.4 million to put the issue on the November ballot and convince voters to support it.
But there’s no word on how much the Arizona Restaurant Association has spent so far trying to keep Proposition 206 from ever getting to voters.
New campaign finance reports due Friday show donations of $1,357,509 to Arizonans for Fair Wages and Health Families, with another $100,000 on loan from campaign consultant Bill Scheel. Most of those dollars — about $900,000 — were spent hiring paid circulators to put the issue on the ballot.
But the secretary of state’s office said Friday it has yet to get a spending report from foes. In fact, spokesman Matt Roberts said foes have not even filed to form a campaign committee, a legal prerequisite for spending any money for or against ballot measures.
There clearly has been some spending.
The restaurant association hired attorneys and filed suit on July 14 in a legal bid, unsuccessful to date, to have the measure removed from the November ballot. And the report due Friday is supposed to cover all expenses through Aug. 18.
Neither Steve Chucri, president of the restaurant group, nor Chiane Hewer, its spokeswoman, returned repeated calls seeking comment.
Roberts said his office has no legal opinion on whether the money spent in court over ballot measures has to be reported. But the legal expenses incurred by initiative supporters are listed, with their report saying the group paid $70,000 to the Torres Law Group to defend them in the lawsuit brought by the restaurant association.
Proposition 206, if approved in November, would immediately hike the state minimum wage from $8.05 an hour now to $10. It would hit $12 an hour by 2020, with future increases linked to inflation.
It also would require companies to provide five days of paid sick leave a year; small employers would have to offer three days.
There is one thing missing, however, from the report by the pro-206 group.
The report shows $998,684 of the donations coming from Living United for Change in Arizona.
But Tomas Robles, former director of LUCHA who is now chairing the campaign, said some of those dollars came from elsewhere. He said the organization has been the beneficiary of funds from groups like the Center for Popular Democracy and the United Food and Commercial Workers union.
Robles said, though, that the way Arizona law has been amended by the Republican-controlled legislature does not require detailing the specific donors or the amounts they gave.
While any spending by the restaurant association to date is unknown, the campaign is likely to be overshadowed, at least financially, by the fight over Proposition 205.
That measure would legalize the recreational use of marijuana by all adults; current law limits use of the drug to those who have certain medical conditions, a doctor’s recommendation and a state-issued ID card.
So far the Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol has amassed more than $3 million in donations.
Of that, $778,950 comes from the Marijuana Policy Project, the national group that funded the successful 2010 campaign for medical marijuana. A separate Marijuana Policy Project Foundation kicked in another $236,572.
Virtually all of the other five- and six-figure donations come from existing medical marijuana dispensaries. Proposition 205 would give them first crack at getting a license for one of the fewer than 150 retail outlets that would be allowed until 2021.
So far the campaign has spent nearly $2.6 million.
The opposition Arizonans for Responsible Drug Policy reported collected $950,011 but has spent less than $294,000.
The Arizona Chamber of Commerce is the largest single source of funds for the anti-205 campaign, so far putting in $114,000.
There’s also a $100,000 donation from T. Sanford Denny. He’s the chairman of United National Corp., which Bloomberg says is a privately owned holding company for First Premier Bank.
Another $100,000 was chipped in by Randy Kendrick, wife of Arizona Diamondbacks owner Ken Kendrick.
The new reports also show that a branch of the Service Employees International Union spent $2.1 million in its ill-fated attempt to put a measure on the ballot to cap the compensation of non-medical hospital executives at $450,000 a year. Proponents gave up after a lawsuit was filed contending that many of the people who circulated petitions had not complied with state law, voiding any of the signatures they collected.
By: Howard Fischer
Source
Still important to let our senators know what we think
Still important to let our senators know what we think
What do Credo Action, MoveOn, Idaho Medical Advocacy, CPD Action, Daily Kos, People’s Action, Elizabeth Warren, Mom’s...
What do Credo Action, MoveOn, Idaho Medical Advocacy, CPD Action, Daily Kos, People’s Action, Elizabeth Warren, Mom’s Rising, Our Revolution, Change.Org, AARP, and the Economic Policy Institute have in common?
Well, possibly lots of things — each is an advocacy group working to change America.
Read the full article here.
Candidates Ready for GOP Debate: Alleged NY Backers of Hate Rhetoric
NEW YORK - Protestors called out some prominent New Yorkers ahead of tonight's GOP presidential candidate debate,...
NEW YORK - Protestors called out some prominent New Yorkers ahead of tonight's GOP presidential candidate debate, accusing them of funding a network of groups that promote anti-immigrant hate speech. Connie Razza, director of strategic research for the Center for Popular Democracy Action, said those allegations are confirmed in a new report that identifies New Yorker Barbara Winston as a financial contributor and board member of groups that, for example, worked to restrict undocumented immigrants' access to driver's licenses in the wake of the 9-11 attacks.
"When Donald Trump talks about deporting all of the undocumented immigrants in the United States," she said, "he's really picking up the platform that these wealthy New Yorkers have been investing in, over years." We reached out for comment to Bruce Winston Gem where Barbara Winston serves as president. Asked to respond to the allegation that Barbara Winston funded hate speech organizations, a manager there said, “No, it is not true.” Immigrant advocates say they protested in front of the Harry Winston Jewelers on Fifth Avenue Tuesday, because they say Barbara Winston owns that property.
Daniel Altschuler, managing director of the Make the Road Action Fund and co-editor of the report, "Backers of Hate in the Empire State," said it calls on nonprofit groups, political parties and the news media to sever ties with the New Yorkers cited in the report and the groups they are allegedly funding. "These are folks that have been buttressing the anti-immigrant infrastructure in this country," he said. "It identifies these folks, and demands that they be held responsible for promoting this kind of anti-immigrant rhetoric and false facts." Razza said it has been a major goal of these anti-immigrant groups to get their views front and center in prime-time slots such as tonight's GOP debate. "These wealthy New Yorkers are providing funding both to this anti-immigrant hate network and to the Republican Party," she said, "and starting to mainstream anti-immigrant hate in a way that's really dangerous."
The report is online at cpdaction.org. - See more at: http://www.publicnewsservice.org/2015-10-28/immigrant-issues/candidates-...
Source: Public News Service
Police lay out security approach for People's March in wake of Dallas shootings
Police lay out security approach for People's March in wake of Dallas shootings
A scheduled protest march by a host of progressive advocacy groups as part of the Still We Rise convention downtown...
A scheduled protest march by a host of progressive advocacy groups as part of the Still We Rise convention downtown came with an added dose of tension and scrutiny a day after a protest in Dallas culminated in the shooting of five police officers.
The “People’s March” scheduled for 2:30 p.m. on Friday is part of the opening festivities for Still We Rise, a convention organized by the Center for Popular Democracy that’s brought 1,500 people to the city to gather over various causes such as workers' rights, climate change, criminal justice reform and many others.
They’re causes that overlap with the protest march in Dallas over recent police shootings in Minnesota and New Orleans. At that march Thursday, snipers targeted police officers, killing five and wounding seven others, according to various reports.
The People’s March is expected to protest against UPMC, Bank of New York Mellon and Republican Sen. Pat Toomey in a parade that will trail from the David L. Convention Center hosting Still We Rise to the U.S. Steel Tower, headquarters for UPMC, then to One Oxford Centre and across the Smithfield Street Bridge to the Pittsburgh office of Pat Toomey.
A spokesman or BNYMellon declined comment on the event. A representative for UPMC did not return a call seeking comment.
A statement by the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police laid out the public safety strategy and acknowledged calling on law enforcement resources beyond Pittsburgh.
“The Pittsburgh Bureau of Police is committed to keeping people safe during this afternoon’s planned People’s Convention March that begins at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center. There will be a visible presence of uniformed officers along with a not-so-visible presence of plain clothes officers,” reads the statement, quoting the event organizers’ intention of protesting growing inequality and “a toxic atmosphere of hate.”
“Officers will exercise extreme caution to ensure the safety of both our officers and the public,” continued the statement. “The Public Safety Department has been and will continue to be in communication with the FBI. The Police Bureau will work closely with law enforcement agencies on the federal, state and local levels.”
The event otherwise marked a modest convention event for the city, in which the 1,500 attendees represent 2,587 room nights at downtown hotels such as the Omni William Penn, the Wyndham Grand Pittsburgh Downtown, the Westin Convention Center and others.
The Still We Rise proceedings come on the same weekend that the city of Pittsburgh is celebrating the 200th anniversary of its incorporation as a city, including a Bicentennial Parade scheduled for Saturday morning at 11:00 a.m., just one of what’s expected to be more than 100 affiliated events throughout the city in the coming weeks.
Yet the city’s celebration of its birthday has been overshadowed by the shootings in Dallas and by the police shootings of black men in Louisiana and Minnesota that helped to trigger them.
Anticipating the anger and sadness from the shootings, on Friday Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto, working with Allegheny County Chief Executive Rich Fitzgerald, called for “communitywide peace summit” to be held sometime next week.
“We are all affected by the violence in our communities – whether it be here in Pittsburgh, in Dallas, or so many other cities – and we all must do everything we can to stop it,” he said in a prepared statement. “Pittsburgh is a strong and resilient place, and our bonds are even stronger when all of us in the city work together.”
Peduto announced the plan for the summit without a determined date at a meeting today of Local Progress, a national network of progressive elected officials and other organization leaders from throughout the country.
By Tim Schooley
Source
1 month ago
1 month ago