Would independent prosecutors make police shooting investigations fairer?
Would independent prosecutors make police shooting investigations fairer?
Critics say the close connections between prosecutors and local police leads to unjust decisions not to prosecute...
Critics say the close connections between prosecutors and local police leads to unjust decisions not to prosecute officers following officer-involved shootings.
The absence of indictments of police officers in shooting deaths – especially in high-profile cases like the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson and Tamir Rice in Cleveland – is raising questions about the fairness of using local prosecutors to investigate police officers with whom they may have close ties.
Critics say the close working relationships between local prosecutors and law enforcement injects a bias into investigations of shootings and other deaths at the hands of police. A solution, some suggest, would be to use independent prosecutors to investigate charges of wrong-doing by police officers.
The investigation into the death of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, La., offers one example of the closeness often seen between prosecutors and police departments. East Baton Rouge District Attorney Hillar Moore recused himself from the investigation, as he had worked closely with both police-officer parents of one of the officers involved in the shooting.
When a police officer is involved in a shooting, often the officer's own police department opens an internal investigation into the incident. In some cases, says Walter Katz, an independent police auditor of the city of San Jose, Calif., who has studied investigations of police use of lethal force, there is evidence that suggests the investigator's close relationship to the officer can lead to a lack of objectivity.
"That can be amplified when also the local prosecuting agency is the agency that reviews to decide whether or not to file criminal charges against a police officer," Mr. Katz tells The Christian Science Monitor. "In smaller jurisdictions ... they're going to have a close working relationship, so it creates the potential impression that it's not an arm's length review of the use of force."
The scarcity of indictments in a variety of high-profile shootings has increased scrutiny of officer prosecutions by local authorities. The prosecutors in both the Tamir Rice case in Cleveland and the Michael Brown case in Ferguson said they believed the officers involved had acted legally. Both were accused of not presenting a fair review of possible charges to the grand juries, as Ari Melber, MSNBC’s chief legal correspondent, explained in The Washington Post.
The problem of officer-involved shootings of blacks wouldn't be solved with independent prosecutors, Marbre Stahly-Butts, the deputy director of racial justice for the Center for Popular Democracy, a progressive advocacy organization, tells the Monitor. But "certainly accountability is an essential step that needs to happen," she says.
"We have the common sense that asking prosecutors who work everyday with police and depend on police for their cases, to then be objective in prosecuting them, is just not reasonable," Ms. Stahly-Butts says.
Local advocates are working to address these issues, Stahly-Butts says, especially in St. Louis and New York, where it has contributed to the passage of an executive order ensuring independent prosecutors.
On the federal level, Congressman Steve Cohen (D) of Tennessee is sponsoring a bill that would withhold federal funding from law enforcement unless the use of independent prosecutors to address instances of deadly force by police is instituted.
"There's no good reason not to have independent prosecutors," he tells the Monitor. "If you have the prosecutors who work with the law enforcement agency, which they do hand-in-glove to investigate cases and present cases, there is... an appearance of, if not outright, impropriety."
This can limit the citizenry's faith in the justice system, especially if no charges are brought against the officers, Representative Cohen says. On the flip side, when local prosecutors do bring charges, police can react negatively. After Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby brought charges against officers in the death of Freddie Gray, some believe there was a work slowdown among Baltimore Police, which police officials denied, the Baltimore Sun reported. This hurts the entire community, Cohen says.
The bill, introduced in October 2015, has 80 co-sponsors as of Wednesday morning. Several states have made moves to implement independent prosecutors, including Connecticut and New York. Cohen says it is important to set a nation-wide standard, but House Judiciary Chairman Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R) of Virginia has not yet scheduled a hearing.
The bill is opposed by the National Association of Police Organizations, a law enforcement advocacy group. The organization's executive director, William Johnson, wrote a letter to Cohen expressing fears that officers would face "a great deal of pressure" if investigated by independent prosecutors, The Hill reported.
"There is a risk that decisions to prosecute would be made based on politics, not on the law and admissible evidence," Johnson wrote. "NAPO is concerned that an officer would be indicted, even if he/she did nothing wrong."
Johnson did not respond to requests for comment from the Monitor.
Cohen says local law enforcement may oppose his bill because they benefit from the current system and may be "getting home cooking".
"That's not what justice is about," he says. "All games should be on neutral courts."
By AIDAN QUIGLEY
Source
How to Build an Anti-Poverty Movement, From the Grassroots Up
The Nation - January 14, 2014, by Greg Kaufman - With more than 46 million people living below the poverty line,...
The Nation - January 14, 2014, by Greg Kaufman - With more than 46 million people living below the poverty line, struggling to survive on $19,530 or less for a family of three, and with more than one in three Americans living on less than twice that amount, scrimping to pay for basics, this country will require a broad-based movement to reverse the decades of failed national imagination.
The groups listed below are all worth watching as they do just that: galvanize communities, arm activists with information, and fight for living-wage jobs, stable housing and a strong safety net that catches people when they fall.
1. Coalition of Immokalee Workers: If you want to see what is possible through grassroots organizing by those who are most affected by poverty—or what it means to set a seemingly unreachable goal and persevere, or understand your opposition and find new ways to challenge it—look no further than the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.
When the CIW was founded in 1993, it was as a small group of tomato farmworkers in Immokalee, Florida, trying to end a twenty-year decline in their poverty wages. Who is historically more powerless than farmworkers? Yet today, most major buyers of Florida tomatoes have signed agreements with the CIW to pay an extra penny per pound for tomatoes. These agreements have resulted in over $11 million in additional earnings for the workers since January 2011.
In addition, through its Fair Food Program, the CIW has persuaded corporate buyers to purchase tomatoes only from growers who sign a strict code of conduct that includes zero tolerance for forced labor or sexual assault. As a result, the majority of growers (those accounting for 90 percent of the tomato industry’s $650 million in revenue) have agreed to that code. If major violations occur but don’t get corrected—and there’s a twenty-four-hour hotline for worker complaints—corporations will not buy from those growers.
The Fair Food Program serves as a new model of social responsibility, and its influence is clear in the recently signed agreement between retailers and factory owners in the Bangladesh garment industry. Follow the CIW not only to get involved with farmworkers but for a sense of what can be achieved through strategic, fearless organizing.
2. Center for Community Change: For forty-five years, the Center for Community Change has worked with low-income communities and local grassroots organizations to fight poverty. The CCC has intentionally worked behind the scenes, keeping the spotlight focused on members of the communities instead and organizing around issues ranging from voter registration, affordable housing and community development to, more recently, immigration reform, healthcare and retirement security.
Executive director Deepak Bhargava says, “We have chosen as our great task in this next era to build a nationwide movement against poverty and for economic justice. The core issue is jobs—making sure that good jobs are available and accessible to everyone.” The CCC plans to work with grassroots organizations at the local and state levels, and then form coalitions at the national level, to demand policies that create good jobs with good wages. Its goal, Bhargava says, is to help build “a massive, diverse, boisterous, energized and organized social movement.”
3. Children’s HealthWatch: This country’s political leaders talk a good game about their commitment to the well-being of children, but in too many cases, their actions tell a far different story. That story is captured, in part, by the pediatricians and healthcare professionals at Children’s HealthWatch.
CHW collects data at pediatric clinics and hospitals to show the real impact of public policy choices on the health, nutrition and development of children up to the age of 4. CHW research has shown, for example, that children receiving SNAP (food stamps) are less likely to be food insecure, underweight or at risk for developmental delays than their peers who are likely eligible for SNAP but not receiving it. CHW has also demonstrated the importance of affordable housing for children’s health, showing that children in households that move frequently or fall behind on rent are significantly more likely to be underweight, in fair or poor health, and at risk for developmental delays than their stably housed peers. And CHW has examined energy insecurity, showing that children in families struggling to afford utilities and keep their homes sufficiently heated or cooled are more likely to be food insecure, hospitalized at some point since birth, or to have moved twice or more in the past year.
By using science to evaluate whether our policies demonstrate a commitment to children and then proposing alternatives, CHW’s research guides activists past the bombast and rhetoric of today’s policy-makers.
4. Half in Ten: This campaign—which I am currently advising—is a project of the Coalition on Human Needs, the Center for American Progress Action Fund, and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and it has 200 partner organizations across the country. Its mission is simple: to cut poverty in half over ten years, just as we did between 1964 and 1973.
Through its comprehensive annual report, Half in Ten tracks the country’s progress toward this goal and outlines the many policies that could help slash poverty. In its 2007 inaugural report, Half in Ten demonstrated how poverty could be reduced by 26 percent simply by passing a modest increase in the minimum wage (to $8.40 at the time), expanding the earned-income tax and child tax credits, and providing affordable childcare to low-income families, among other proposals. Our leaders failed to make those recommended policy changes, and then the economy crashed, burying ever more Americans in deeper holes.
But Half in Ten keeps pushing toward its goal. In addition to policy analysis, the campaign mobilizes local groups in the field to speak out and take action during congressional policy debates. The campaign also works through its “Our American Story” project to ensure that low-income people have opportunities to tell their stories to the media, policy-makers and other advocacy groups. Follow Half in Ten to get a sense of the anti-poverty policy landscape, take action at the federal level, and hear powerful stories about individuals and families who are struggling to survive in this broken economy.
5. Occupy Our Homes/Home Defenders League: Many of us would like to believe that the foreclosure crisis is over, but the fact is that far too many people are still losing their homes because banks refuse to modify mortgages, fail to return phone calls, or simply (and scandalously) file fraudulent paperwork. If my family or neighbors were ever in a dire situation with a bank that refused to work with them, Occupy Our Homes and the Home Defenders League (HDL) are the allies I would want on my side.
With community partners in more than twenty-five cities and states, these activists help homeowners organize protests, call-ins to bank officials, and other actions to cut through the bureaucratic roadblocks that individuals and families encounter when they deal with the banks. They also show up with neighbors to stop forced evictions.
In May, Occupy and HDL mobilized hundreds of people for a sit-in at the Justice Department, successfully shaming the feds and playing a key role in restarting stalled litigation against Wall Street. They are also collaborating with dozens of local groups, large and small, to rebuild the wealth stripped out of communities of color by pressing cities to use their power of eminent domain to do what the banks have refused to do: enact wide-scale principal reductions.
6. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: As we approach the fiftieth anniversary of the War on Poverty, conservatives are deploying bogus “studies” and revisionist history to attempt to discredit programs that are not only vital to people who are struggling, but have been proven effective in preventing much higher poverty rates. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities does a forceful job of countering this misinformation with analyses that—tellingly—conservatives rarely challenge.
During policy debates about programs like SNAP, TANF (welfare), healthcare, housing, Social Security, disability insurance, Medicaid, Medicare and other domestic priorities, you can count on CBPP experts to provide vital, clear-eyed analysis of how government programs work. Follow the work of policy wizards like Arloc Sherman, LaDonna Pavetti, Liz Schott, Jared Bernstein, Robert Greenstein, Douglas Rice, Kathy Ruffing and others to get the information you need to see through the spin, misinformation and outright lies about key policies that combat poverty.
7. Jobs With Justice: For twenty-six years, Jobs With Justice has built powerful coalitions with labor, community, student and faith leaders to protect and advance the rights of working people. Most recently, Jobs With Justice has played a pivotal role in the national Caring Across Generations campaign, which helped secure historic overtime and minimum-wage protections for homecare workers. Its Debt-Free Future campaign has mobilized students and concerned citizens to make college more affordable, expose abusive private lenders and win debt relief for working families. Jobs With Justice is also a critical partner in challenging the exploitative labor practices of employers like Walmart and the large fast food chains, and in protecting the right of immigrant workers to organize without threat of retaliation.
With its savvy use of strategic communications, original research and on-the-ground mobilizing, Jobs With Justice is challenging the structural problems of our economy in creative and effective ways.
8. Western Center on Law and Poverty: Translating grassroots activism into legislative victories will require strong inside/outside partnerships at the local, state and federal levels. One group that has mastered this delicate dance is the Western Center on Law and Poverty in Sacramento, California.
California is the seat of some of the poorest congressional districts in the nation, and it’s also home to more poor Americans than any other state. For over a decade, the state government has been dominated by budget austerity—California was the epicenter of the “no tax” pledge—as well as the kind of budget brinkmanship that now plagues Congress. But in part through the Western Center’s leadership, advocates have moved from simply defending against cuts to articulating a shared vision for a more vibrant, inclusive economy.
The Western Center has spearheaded new alliances among women, immigrants, the working poor, people without homes, the formerly incarcerated, food stamp recipients, labor union members, college students, youth and others, creating new opportunities for low-income people to get involved in effecting change. The result has been a series of notable victories, such as requiring call centers serving Californians who need public assistance to be located in-state in order to create jobs; restoring dental care through Medicaid; enacting protections against excessive bank fines or fees; introducing a Homeless Bill of Rights to outlaw the criminalization of homelessness; and protecting SNAP from federal cuts. The Western Center and its allies have also defended against bad policy proposals like the ALEC-inspired legislation to drug-test public assistance applicants. Follow this group to see how diverse coalitions get results at the state level.
9. Center for Hunger-Free Communities, Witnesses to Hunger: Founded in Philadelphia in 2008, Witnesses to Hunger is a research and advocacy project led by mothers and other caregivers of young children who have experienced hunger and poverty. Through photography and testimonials, Witnesses advocates for change at the local, state and national levels. There are now more than eighty Witnesses in various cities, including Philadelphia, Camden, Boston and Baltimore. (A new chapter in Sacramento is in the works.) In addition to lobbying Congress on issues like food stamps, welfare and affordable housing, Witnesses is vocal in its insistence that people living in poverty be included in conversations among advocates and political leaders in Washington, where low-income people are too often talked about but never heard. Follow this group to learn about poverty and hunger—which policies help, which policies harm—and to work directly alongside those living in poverty.
10. NETWORK: While the real power of an anti-poverty movement will come from the grassroots, a national leader who mobilizes people of faith and speaks with prophetic authority can play a powerful role—especially since the opposition so often cites Scripture as a justification for stripping the safety net.
Sister Simone Campbell and NETWORK, a Catholic social justice lobby, captured the attention of millions of Americans as well as the mainstream media with their 2012 “Nuns on the Bus” Tour challenging Congressman Paul Ryan’s reckless budget proposals. Since then, Sister Simone has proved that she can not only tap into a network of progressive faith-based organizations, but also respond effectively to the absurd proposition that charities and religious institutions can address the needs that arise from a broken economy on their own, without the help of government resources. What’s more, she was masterful during Ryan’s hearing on the War on Poverty, eloquently batting away assertions that social programs create dependence and that the minimum wage should be banned, as well as challenges to her own standing as a Catholic.
While an anti-poverty movement will need nonviolent civil disobedience and avenues to express anger and despair, Sister Simone and NETWORK have shown that it’s possible to beat the opposition at its own game.
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The Retail Industry is Marginalizing Women and People of Color. This Has to Change.
The Retail Industry is Marginalizing Women and People of Color. This Has to Change.
Source: In These Times...
Source: In These Times
The National Retail Federation is fond of pointing out that “retail means jobs.” And it’s true: the retail industry today provides one in ten private-sector jobs in the U.S., a number set to grow in the next decade.
Yet new findings show those jobs may be keeping retail workers and their families from rising up the career ladder, exacerbating our country’s growing inequality. The findings from the Center for Popular Democracy demonstrate that, for women and people of color especially, working in retail often means instability and low pay. Both groups make up the lion’s share of cashiers, movers, and other poorly paid positions and barely figure in the upper ranks of management. In general merchandise—including big-box stores such as Target and Wal-Mart—women hold more than 80 percent of cashier jobs, the lowest-paid position. And in the food and beverage industry, women make up approximately half of the workforce but less than a fifth of managers.
People of color in the retail industry are often relegated to the least lucrative jobs as well. In home and garden stores like Home Depot and Lowes, for example, employees of color account for 24 percent of the total workforce—but 36 percent of jobs that pay least.
The findings are especially disappointing given the opportunities available for those who succeed. Certain areas of retail, such as home and garden stores and car dealers, offer living wages to workers—but both women and people of color are largely shut out of these sub-sectors. And management jobs across the industry provide wages and benefits that can allow workers to support themselves and their families—but they are closed off to many.
Reducing these disparities will take more than a bigger paycheck. Retailers must make a concerted effort to establish policies that ensure women and people of color are equally represented in management positions and develop more robust training programs for workers just starting out that give them the chance to advance.
Many retailers have training policies in place, but they can be far from meaningful. Wal-Mart, for example, recently announced it was raising wages to $10, dependent on completion of a six-month training program—an onerous requirement to earn a pitifully low wage that lags well behind the retail sector average. Real training can introduce employees to a range of job duties and responsibilities, incentivizing them to learn specialized skills that allow workers to pick up shifts, advance to higher-paying positions, and bring home a full-time paycheck. Sectors like finance long ago recognized internal barriers to promotion and created programs to promote equal opportunity. Why do we not expect the same of retail?
Retailers that lack such programs, from Walmart to Gristedes, have faced multi-million-dollar class-action lawsuits from women harmed by policies that prevented them from moving upward. Companies that fail to enact real advancement policies can expect similar pushback.
Moreover, workers at the lowest levels are doubly punished with erratic, last-minute scheduling that wreaks havoc on their lives. These schedules are particularly difficult for women. Unable to find childcare at the last minute or unwilling to miss bedtime every night, moms in retail are often deemed ineligible for promotion. Ironically, climbing up the job ladder is the only way to obtain stable hours that let working women and their families thrive.
As these practices have grown worse, many workers have started fighting back, demanding schedules that let them plan their lives, be there for their families and pursue education.
Facing outside pressure, policymakers have also stepped in and accelerated the pace of change. Retailers demonstrated how fast they could change last year when they received a letter from New York’s Attorney General into their use of on-call scheduling. Within months, major retailers like The Gap agreed to significant reforms—and a quarter of a million workers no longer had to put their life on hold for a shift.
State and city policymakers are also leading the way to raise workplace standards, pursuing policies to raise wages to $15 per hour, secure improved work schedules, and guarantee earned sick time. Creating higher-paying, more secure retail jobs will boost the economy, as the low-income retail workforce will likely use any additional earnings to cover basic expenses.
Yet if industry leaders want retail to mean good jobs, they must step up to the plate. Retail workers are the neighbors who shop in our local small businesses; parents trying to help their kids with homework; students working their way through college. It’s clear that retail jobs are holding too many women and people of color back. Rather than superficial fixes, we need bold solutions that move all retail workers forward and allow their families to thrive.
New York Fed taps Williams for top post, ignoring Democrats on diversity
New York Fed taps Williams for top post, ignoring Democrats on diversity
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) had called for the co-chairs and Williams to appear before the Senate Banking Committee...
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) had called for the co-chairs and Williams to appear before the Senate Banking Committee if Williams ended up as the choice. Fed Up co-director Shawn Sebastian said the coalition supports that call. “Today, the Fed concluded another opaque and controversial Reserve Bank presidential selection process by ignoring the demands of the public and choosing another white man whose record on Wall St regulation and full employment raises serious questions,” he said in a tweet.
Read the full article here.
Arrests Made At Protest Outside UES Home Of JPMorgan Chase Exec
Arrests Made At Protest Outside UES Home Of JPMorgan Chase Exec
Hundreds of people picketed outside of 1185 Park Ave. around 8 a.m. to deliver more than 100,000 petition signatures...
Hundreds of people picketed outside of 1185 Park Ave. around 8 a.m. to deliver more than 100,000 petition signatures demanding that JPMorgan Chase stop financing immigrant detention centers and private prisons, protest organizers said. The demonstration was organized by groups such as Make the Road New York, New York Communities for Change and the Center for Popular Democracy.
Read the full article here.
Multiple Arrests In Midtown During May Day Protests Outside Banks
Multiple Arrests In Midtown During May Day Protests Outside Banks
Hundreds of labor and immigrant advocates marched through east midtown early Monday in a demonstration against...
Hundreds of labor and immigrant advocates marched through east midtown early Monday in a demonstration against corporations which they say are profiting from President Trump's agenda—one of a series of May Day protests scheduled to take place throughout the city (and beyond) on Monday.
The specific targets of this action, according to organizers from Make The Road New York, are the Wall Street banks that help finance private prisons and immigrant detention centers. To that end, organizers said twelve protesters were arrested for peaceful civil disobedience while blocking the entrances outside of JPMorgan Chase, which is one of the companies named in Make The Road's and the Center for Popular Democracy's Backers Of Hate campaign.
Read full article here.
Facebook Founder Gives $20mm Donation On Hillary To Defeat Trump's "Fear And Hostility" Campaign
Facebook Founder Gives $20mm Donation On Hillary To Defeat Trump's "Fear And Hostility" Campaign
A few weeks back we noted how Bullard had questioned the intentions of ex-Facebook founder Dustin Moskovitz in funding...
A few weeks back we noted how Bullard had questioned the intentions of ex-Facebook founder Dustin Moskovitz in funding the Center for Popular Democracy's Fed Up campaign (see "Why Is Facebook Funding "Anti-Fed" Activists"). The "Fed Up" group has mounted an aggressive effort to convince the Fed to keep rates ultra low noting they favor central banking policies that "are aimed at making sure lower income households and minorities share in the recovery to the same degree as the well off."
Ironically, Moskovitz, and his inflated FaceBook shares, are among the key beneficiaries of "ultra low rates" and not so much the poor and struggling people of this country. A fact that was not lost on St. Louis Fed president James Bullard. Per our previous post:
When it comes to Fed Up, "it's Facebook money," Bullard said. "I think it's kind of a funny thing for them to fund because they want low interest rates in an era where we are awash in low interest rates, so it's kind of crazy, isn't it?"
"I think that Dustin Moskovitz should be here, maybe he can helicopter in from Sun Valley or something instead of sending all these people, if he wants low interest rates. He could just come and argue about it," Mr. Bullard said.
Just a few short weeks later we now learn that the billionaire techie, and former college roommate of Mark Zuckerberg, is set to become one of the largest donors to the Democratic Party. According to CNN, Moskovitz will donate a total of $20 million to various Democratic organizations making him the 3rd most generous donor of this election cycle. But Moskovitz, at least if taken at his word, isn't really donating to elect Hillary as much as to defeat Trump saying that he wants to teach Republicans a lesson that by "supporting this kind of candidate, they compel people to act in response."
"This decision was not easy, particularly because we have reservations about anyone using large amounts of money to influence elections," Moskovitz and his wife, Cari Tuna, wrote in a post on Medium. "We hope these efforts make it a little more likely that Secretary Clinton is able to pursue the agenda she's outlined, and serve as a signal to the Republican Party that by running this kind of campaign - one built on fear and hostility?—?and supporting this kind of candidate, they compel people to act in response."
"Cari and I have dedicated our lives to figuring out how to do the most good we can with the resources we've been given. Until now, those efforts have not included making endorsements or contributions in presidential elections," Moskovitz wrote. "The Republican Party, and Donald Trump in particular, is running on a zero-sum vision, stressing a false contest between their constituency and the rest of the world."
But perhaps Moskovitz is less concerned about Trump spreading "fear and hostility" and more concerned about his recent comments suggesting that the only thing the Fed has created with "ultra low rates" is a "strong artificial stock market." Per CNN,
"They're keeping rates down because they don't want everything else to go down," the Republican presidential nominee told Reuters on Monday.
Trump said the "only thing that is strong is the artificial stock market."
"We have a very false economy," Trump told Reuters. "At some point the rates are going to have to change."
Sounds like someone is a little worried about bubbly tech markets?
By Tyler Durden
Source
Why It's a Big Deal Hillary Clinton Plans to Shake Up the Fed
Why It's a Big Deal Hillary Clinton Plans to Shake Up the Fed
Hillary Clinton is taking on the United States Federal Reserve System, but in a wonky, bottom's-up way that shows her...
Hillary Clinton is taking on the United States Federal Reserve System, but in a wonky, bottom's-up way that shows her understanding of a complex and widely misunderstood organization. This is not "End the Fed" or even "audit the Fed" — she wants to rebuild it from its fundamentals at the regional level.
To paraphrase Mitt Romney, the Federal Reserve is people, my friend. Hillary Clinton's recent proposal to change the roster of Fed officials who ultimately make monetary policy and regulatory decisions might be the most effective Fed-reform idea since the financial crisis. Generally, the public pays attention to little more than the face of the organization — the Fed's chairperson, currently Janet Yellen — who announces and explains the Fed's decisions. But beneath Yellen functions an intricate and influential bureaucracy that's dominated by interests from the financial sector, the vast majority of them white men, and may well be blind to the reality of a vast majority of Americans.
The Federal Reserve was set up in 1917, in the wake of a financial crisis, as a private national bank that could serve as lender of last resort to other banks. If a bank needed money to make good on deposits, it could go to the Fed for a short-term loan. It was, since its inception, a bankers' institution, run for banks, by banks. But its role has clearly evolved as credit markets have developed and as the Fed's mandate was changed to pursue price stability (low inflation) and full employment at the same time, while helping to regulate the sector for which it also serves as lender.
As the Fed's mission has expanded, its governance has not. The Fed is run by a seven-member board in Washington, D.C., and a dozen regional bank presidents based in financial centers throughout the country (New York, St. Louis, Kansas City and Cleveland, among others). While the crew in D.C. is selected by the president and vetted by Congress, the regional bank presidents are chosen by the financial industry and tend to be either bankers or career Fed employees. Of the 12 bank presidents, two are women and only one is not white.
New York's regional president is Willian C. Dudley, previously a Goldman Sachs managing director. Robert S. Kaplan of Dallas was a former vice chairman at Goldman. Neel Kashkari, a known financial reformer, is nonetheless a former employee of PIMCO, one of the world's largest asset managers and a subsidiary of German financial behemoth Allianz. Dennis P. Lockhart, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta is a former Citigroup executive.
Clinton's proposal would remove bankers from the regional boards of directors. Those boards choose the regional presidents and generate most of the information and perspective that the Federal Reserve governors use to set monetary policy. Clinton clearly understands how the Fed functions. Donald Trump has said he would not reappoint Janet Yellen as chair. Fine. But appointing the Fed chair is merely the most high-profile action a president can take in this regard. It doesn't change the system, and the Fed is known as the Federal Reserve System for a reason.
This is Clinton at her best – she knows how the government works. The region Federal Reserve boards do not get a lot of press. Most people do not know that they are staffed with chief executives from Morgan Stanley, Comerica, KeyCorp and private-equity firms like Silver Lake, and if they do know it, they do not understand its importance.
The Fed is generally a topic of political bluster. "I appointed him and he disappointed me," complained George H.W. Bush about Alan Greenspan, when the Fed chair refused to cut interest rates in the face of a recession that probably cost Bush his re-election in 1992. Before that, Ronald Reagan had to endure Chairman Paul Volcker raising interest rates so high in an effort to combat inflation that out-of-work construction workers were mailing bricks and wooden beams to the Fed in protest.
The idea that the Fed often acts contrary to the interests of working people is not new, but aside from requiring the Fed to pursue full employment in addition to price stability in 1977, presidents who are unhappy with the Fed have done little more than complain. Even after Greenspan disappointed Bush, Bill Clinton reappointed him to the post. When Greenspan retired, Ben Bernanke, an intellectual heir, took the helm. When he retired, Yellen, also an intellectual heir, took over. The power to appoint the Fed chair and governors is not, clearly, the power to change things.
Clinton is digging deeper. Changing the roster of the regional boards will hopefully help more accurate economic information trickle up to the chairperson and the federal governors. Perhaps, even, a labor representative or somebody with closer ties to the common American experience could become a regional bank president.
In her quiet way, tinkering with the inner workings of a near-century old quasi-government institution that is arcane to most, Clinton has a chance to achieve radical, lasting financial reform.
BY MICHAEL MAIELLO
Source
Calling all mayors: This is what police reform should look like
The coverage of police brutality over the last year, both in the mass media and through civilian video footage, has...
The coverage of police brutality over the last year, both in the mass media and through civilian video footage, has been a wake-up call for many Americans, shining a spotlight on what many communities of color already knew—our policing and criminal justice systems are infused with systemic racial bias.
Thanks to the relentless work of community advocates, the aggressive police tactics that routinely threaten the lives and safety of people of color have garnered unprecedented national attention.
This attention, however, is no guarantee of real change. In fact, one year after Michael Brown’s killing, police shootings and protests continue in Ferguson, Missouri.
Despite the growing body of evidence on the nature and extent of the problem, the path towards meaningful reform has not been clear, leaving many local leaders at a loss as to how to move forward.
But the actions of local government—mayors in particular—couldn’t be more important. Channeling the current momentum into transformative change will require leadership across local, regional, and federal levels, but mayors are in a unique position to be the vanguard, taking trailblazing steps towards transforming how police departments interact with their communities.
While some have bemoaned a lack of consensus around a roadmap to police reform, those on the ground—community members, organizers, elected officials, police officers and chiefs—raise the concepts of accountability, oversight, community respect, and limiting the scope of policing again and again. Our organizations spent close to a year collecting success stories and insight from communities across the country, from Los Angeles to Cleveland to Baltimore, to create a toolkit for advocates working to end police violence. We identified several common principles that all mayors can—and should—put in place to establish sustainable, community-centered and controlled policing.
Several of these principles have received national attention, such as demilitarizing police departments, providing police recruits with training in racial bias, de-escalation, and conflict mediation, and making police more accountable to communities through civilian oversight bodies and independent investigations of alleged police misconduct. Thanks to the commitment of a proactive mayor, this kind of community accountability is already being put in place in Newark, which just approved a progressive Civilian Complaint Review Board that provides landmark community oversight in a city with a long history of police brutality.
Mayors should also institute policies that scale back over-policing, especially for minor ‘broken-windows’ offenses that criminalize too many communities and burden already-impoverished households with exorbitant fees and fines. Ferguson’s court system became an infamous example, but routine targeting of and profiteering off of low-income communities of color is pervasive throughout the country. Local governments must not only fix broken municipal court systems but should also scale back the tide of criminalization through decriminalizing offenses that have nothing to do with public safety. With the strong support of the mayor, the Minneapolis City Council recently decriminalized two non-violent offenses—spitting and lurking—which had been used to racially profile.
The last piece of the puzzle may be politically controversial, but is absolutely fundamental to transforming our broken systems of policing and criminal justice and supporting safer and stronger communities. Local governments cannot continue to pour ever-increasing sums into city police budgets, while ignoring the most basic needs of residents living in over-policed areas: better schools, job opportunities, access to healthy food, affordable housing, and public transportation. Neighborhoods most afflicted by aggressive policing and high incarceration rates also have high levels of poverty, unemployment, and racial segregation. In many urban neighborhoods where millions of dollars are spent to lock up residents, the education infrastructure and larger social net are completely crippled. Investments to build up vulnerable communities need to be viewed as part of a comprehensive public safety strategy.
Baltimore mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake called for a Department of Justice investigation of the city’s police department only after tragedy struck and the community rose up in protest. It is time for the mayors of this country to instead take a proactive Mayoral Pledge to End Police Violenceto heal the wounds of broken policing and criminal justice policies before another devastating police killing.
Blackwell is the founder and CEO of PolicyLink. Friedman is the co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy.
Source: The Hill
Education “Reformers’” New Big Lie: Charter Schools Become Even More Disastrous
Salon - March 2, 2015, by Jeff Bryant -What fun we had recently with North Carolina’s recently elected U.S. senator,...
Salon - March 2, 2015, by Jeff Bryant -What fun we had recently with North Carolina’s recently elected U.S. senator, Republican Thom Tillis, who insisted we didn’t need government regulations to compel restaurant employees to wash their hands in between using the toilet and preparing our food.
His solution to proper sanitation practices in restaurants – “the market will take care of that” – was roundly mocked by left-leaning commentators as an example of the way conservatives uphold the interests of businesses and moneymaking above all other concerns.
Fun, for sure, but it’s no laughing matter that the Tillis plan for public sanitation appears to increasingly be the philosophy for governing the nation’s schools.
Rather than directly address what ails struggling public schools, policy leaders increasingly claim that giving parents more choice about where they send their children to school – and letting that parent choice determine the funding of schools – will create a market mechanism that leaves the most competent schools remaining “in business” while incompetent schools eventually close.
Coupled with more “choice” are demands to increase the numbers of unregulated charter schools, especially those operated by private management firms that now have come to dominate roughly half the charter sector.
As schools lose more and more students to the charter schools, parents then “vote with their feet,” choice advocates argue, and the market will “work.”
Why the “Tillis Rule” that seems so wrong for public health has been declared the wave of the future for the nation’s schoolchildren and families seems to hardly ever get questioned.
Tarheel School Choice Extravaganza
The Tillis Rule is certainly now the driving force behind new education policy in North Carolina, as rapid charter school expansions and a new voucher plan have opened up public schools to various “market forces.”
How’s that working out?
So far, not so hot. For instance, in Charlotte, at least three charter schools abruptly closed down this year alone, some after having been in operation for only a few months. The most recent shutdown was particularly noticeable.
That school, Entrepreneur High, focused on teaching students job skills, so they could be financially independent when they graduated. Turns out the school had its own financial problems with only $14 in the bank and $400,000 in debt. In fact, the school never even really had a financial plan at all.
In other news from the front of “school choice” in the Tarheel State, left-leaning group N.C. Policy Watch recently reported about a state auditor who checked the books of a Kinston charter school and found the school overstated attendance–thereby inflating its state funds by more than $300,000.
The school shorted its staff by more than $370,000 in payroll obligations, according to reports, while making “questionable payments of more than $11,000″ to the CEO and his wife. And the CEO’s daughter was being paid $40,000 to be the school’s academic officer even though she had zero experience in teaching or school administration.
When the reporter, Lindsay Wagner, tried to contact the school’s CEO to question him about the auditor’s findings, she discovered he had left his position and was working elsewhere in the state – running a different charter school.
Meanwhile, the state has rolled out another school choice venture: vouchers, called Opportunity Scholarships, that allow parents to pull their kids out of public schools and get taxpayer funding to enroll the kids in the schools of their choice. Wagner, again, wondered where the money was heading and found 90 percent of it goes to private religious institutions.
More recently, Wagner’s account of this money found “more than $4,000,000 worth of taxpayer-funded school vouchers have now been paid out to private schools.” Of the top 12 private schools benefiting from this money, all are religious schools.
Also, Wagner reported, voucher funds come with “virtually no accountability measures attached … Private schools are also free to use any curriculum they see fit, employ untrained, unlicensed teachers and conduct criminal background checks only on the heads of schools. For the most part, they do not have to share their budgets or financial practices with the public, in spite of receiving public dollars.”
It’s unfair, however, to single out North Carolina for school choice shenanigans.
Charter Corruption Spreads, Grows
In Ohio, for instance, a recent investigation into charter schools by state auditors found evidence of fraud that made North Carolina’s pale in comparison. The privately operated schools get nearly $6,000 in taxpayer money for every student they enroll, but half the charter schools the auditor looked at had “significantly lower” attendance than what they claimed in state funding.
One charter school in Youngstown had no students at all, having sent the kids home for the day at 12:30 in the afternoon.
This form of charter school fraud is so widespread, according to an article in Education Week, many states now employ “‘mystery’ or ‘secret shopper’ services used in retail” that pose as inquiring parents to call charter schools to ensure they’re educating the students they say they are.
Enrollment inflation is not the only form of fraud charter schools practice. In Missouri, a federal judge recently fingered a nationwide chain of charter schools, Imagine, for “self-dealing” in a lease agreement that allowed it to fleece a local charter school of over a million dollars.
“The facts of the case mirror arrangements in Ohio and other states,” the reporter noted, “where Imagine schools pay exorbitant rent to an Imagine subsidiary, SchoolHouse Finance. The high lease payments leave little money for classroom instruction and help explain the poor academic records of Imagine schools in both states.”
A charter school manager in Michigan is about to go on trial for steering nearly a million dollars in public funds targeted to renovate his charter school into his own bank account.
In Washington, which was late to the game of charters and choice, the state’s first charter school is already under investigation for financial and academic issues.
Investigators in the District of Columbia, recently uncovered a charter school operator who “funneled $13 million of public money into a private company for personal gain.”
A recent report from the Center for Popular Democracy looked at charter school finances in Illinois and found “$13.1 million in fraud by charter school officials … Because of the lack of transparency and necessary oversight, total fraud is estimated at $27.7 million in 2014 alone.”
One example the CPD report cited was of a charter operator in Chicago who used charter school funds amounting to more than $250,000 to purchase personal items from luxury department stores, including $2,000 on hair care and cosmetic products and $5,800 for jewelry.
The report made specific policy recommendations, including financial reviews and a moratorium on new charters, to increase the transparency and accountability of these schools – the type of policy recommendations charter and school choice fans continue to fight at every turn.
Voucher Ventures Expand Across the Country
While charter school operations continue to waste public money on scandals and fraud – all in the name of “choice” – newly enacted school vouchers divert more public school dollars to private schools.
In parts of Ohio, “the state-sponsored voucher program has increased or even doubled enrollment at some private schools.”
In Indiana, which has the largest taxpayer-funded school voucher program in the country, according to a local source, virtually all of the participating schools, 97 percent, are religiously affiliated private schools.
In Louisiana, over a third of students using voucher funds to attend private schools are enrolled schools “doing such a poor job of educating them that the schools have been barred from taking new voucher students.”
In parts of Wisconsin, “private schools accepting vouchers receive more money per student than public school districts do for students attending through open enrollment.”
Despite the obvious misdirection of taxpayer money, more states are eager to roll out new voucher plans or expand the ones they have. As the Economist recently reported, “After the Republicans’ success in state elections in November, several are pushing to increase the number and scope of school voucher schemes,” including Wisconsin, where probable presidential candidate Scott Walker has proposed to remove all limits on the number of schoolchildren who could attend private schools at taxpayer expense.
Of course, not all voucher-like schemes are called “vouchers.” According to a report from Politico, some states are considering voucher-like mechanisms called Education Savings Accounts that allow parents to pocket taxpayer money that would normally pay for public schools to be used for other education pursuits, including private school and home schooling. Two states – Florida and Arizona – already have them, but six more may soon follow.
Vouchers Hit the Hill
Support for vouchers extends to Congress, as another Politico article reported, where Republican, and some Democratic, lawmakers are “proposing sweeping voucher bills and nudging school choice into conversations about the 2016 primaries.”
According to a report from Education Week, congressional Republicans leading the effort to rewrite the nation’s federal education policy, called No Child Left Behind, are “intent on drafting the most-conservative version of the federal K-12 law possible,” which would include a voucher-like scheme allowing federal money designated as Title I funds, the program for schools with low-income students, “to follow those students to the school of their choice, including private schools.”
In fact, working its way through the U.S. House of Representatives currently is a bill called the Student Success Act that would provide for this “Title I Portability.” In the U.S. Senate, according to Education Week, Title I Portability is also included in a draft bill to rewrite NCLB introduced by Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee.
“Everyone should care and learn about Title I Portability,” warns public school advocate Jan Resseger on Public School Shakedown, a blog site operated by the Progressive magazine.
Resseger points to a statement by the National Coalition for Public Education stating, “This proposal would undermine Title I’s fundamental purpose of assisting public schools with high concentrations of poverty and high-need students.” Resseger also cites, from the Center on American Progress, a brief opposing Title I Portability. “According to CAP,” Resseger explains, Title I Portability would be “Robin Hood in Reverse … taking from the poor and giving to the rest,” ignoring the long-known fact that socioeconomic isolation has a devastating impact, as, on average, “school districts with highly concentrated family poverty would lose $85 per student while more affluent school districts would gain, on average, $290 per student.”
Despite the damage that Title I Portability could do to public schools serving our most high-needs students, charter school advocates appear to back the measure, according to a recent post at Education Week. “By and large, we feel that when the dollars follow children to the school that they select, you create a better marketplace for reform,” the president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools Nina Rees is quoted.
What about those charters that continue to commit waste and fraud while they funnel public money into privately operated businesses? Will “the market will take care of that”?
Where Choice Fails
Back to the Tillis Rule, consider another example of leaving public health policy up to individual choice: the recent measles outbreak.
That outbreak made it abundantly clear that where parents have the good fortune to be “safe in the herd” of vaccinated children, they often don’t feel an obligation to vaccinate their own offspring.
One can be sympathetic to parents with religious beliefs, or parents who simply hate seeing their babies being stuck with needles, and still justifiably point out to those parents that their “principles” come at the expense of other people’s potential inconvenience, expense and, possibly, suffering.
If those parents lived in a very different country that didn’t provide safety in the herd – or, in the case of Sen. Tillis, didn’t provide for basic sanitation – they’d probably feel quite differently about imposed health regulations.
Certainly comparing healthcare policy to education is not a false equivalency. The two policy arenas are strongly interrelated. The positive correlation between numbers of years of education to healthcare outcomes is well documented.
Further, parents clustered around schools often may share the same information and attitudes, which also can affect health outcomes.
In the case of the recent measles outbreak in California, University of Maryland sociologist Philip N. Cohen took numbers initially crunched by Duke University sociology professor Kieran Healy and found, “Runaway vaccine exemptions are problems of the private and charter schools … The average charter school kindergartner goes to school with classmates almost five times more likely to be non-vaccinated; and charter school kids are more than 3-times as likely to be in class with 5 percent or more kids exempt.”
As Cohen revealed, charter schools he examined have “fewer kids eligible for free-lunch than regular public schools (43 percent versus 55 percent). … Rich charter schools on average have the highest [vaccine] exemption rates, while poor schools – charter or not – are heavily clustered around zero.”
Cohen concluded, “Because they are more parent-driven, or targeted at certain types of parents, charter schools are more ideologically homogeneous. And because anti-vaccine ideology is concentrated among richer parents, charter schools provide them with a fertile breeding ground in which to generate and transmit anti-vaccine ideas.” (H/T Ron Wile.)
Better Than Choice: A Guarantee
Tillis Rule notwithstanding, most people understand that public health policy should be guided not by desires to maximize personal choice but by the need to guarantee public safety and wellbeing. That guarantee, rather than the maximization of choice, is what makes it possible to have the freedom to conduct commerce, live and work safely in our communities, and move about freely in society.
Why should that guarantee we insist on for public health be any different from what we insist on for public education?
Instead, with today’s school choice crowd, children’s guaranteed access to high-quality public education appears to be no longer the goal – either by policy or practice.
Under the Tillis Rule, it’s assumed some schools will be allowed to remain lousy at least for some substantial period of time (how long is anyone’s guess), while “the money follows the child,” “people vote with their feet” and “the market works.”
Any negative consequences to those students and families unlucky or unfortunate enough to be stuck in the not-so-good schools – after all, it’s impossible for every family to get into the “best school” – seem to not matter one whit.
And that’s really sick.
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