CPD IN THE NEWS

By Greenpeace

In the final day of a record-setting week of civil disobedience at the Capitol, more than 300 people were arrested Monday as they demanded democracy reforms.

Yesterday's arrests came on the third and final day of Democracy Awakening. Combined with arrests made during the recent Democracy Spring, the protests constituted what organizers believe is a record for civil disobedience over democracy issues during this century.

The message: On voting rights, money in politics and the recent vacancy on U.S. Supreme Court, Congress is failing to do its job and ignoring the will of the people. Democracy Awakening isn't the end of something, but the beginning of a new phase in the movement for democracy, organizers said.

Those who planned to risk arrest included NAACP president and CEO Cornell William Brooks; the Rev. William Barber II, pastor and Moral Monday architect; radio commentator Jim Hightower; Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, co-founders of Ben and Jerry's; Greenpeace Executive Director Annie Leonard; and Sierra Club President Aaron Mair.

Here's what they had to say about why they risked arrest at our nation's Capitol:

"I'm willing to risk arrest, arm in arm with partners from the civil rights and the labor movements, in order to help fix our democracy," Leonard said. "We will never get the kind of political progress needed to challenge climate change and systemic racism if corporate cash continues to mean more to politicians than the voices of the people."

"Democracy is supposed to be for all of us, but right now we have an out-of-balance system favoring the interests of big money," Cohen said. "This can't go on. I'm prepared to risk arrest to send a message that democracy should truly be of, by, and for the people."

"At a certain point, you have to say enough is enough," Greenfield said. "I have decided to risk arrest because we can't continue to have a political system where ordinary people are shut out of the process. It's not what our founders envisioned, and it's not what democracy is supposed to be about."

"We cannot sit by and watch obstructionists push an agenda of inequity, injustice and inaction -- and I'm willing to risk being arrested in order to make my voice heard in in the fight to ensure that every voice can be heard in our democracy," Mair said. "All too often, the costs of these assaults on our democracy fall on low-income communities and communities of color that already face disproportionate effects from pollution and the climate crisis. A zip code should never dictate the destiny of any American citizen."

Thousands of activists from around the country streamed into the nation's capital April 16-18 for Democracy Awakening, which featured teach-ins, a rally, a march and lobbying as well as the civil disobedience. The aim: to fight back against business as usual in Washington, DC.

More than 300 organizations endorsed Democracy Awakening. Democracy Awakening is part of a broad movement aimed at advancing democracy reforms. The mobilization began April 2, with Democracy Spring, an event that featured a march from Philadelphia to Washington D.C., followed by six days of sit-ins at the Capitol.

Others who planned to risk arrest included top leaders of the AFL-CIO, All Souls Unitarian Church, the American Federation of Government Employees, the American Postal Workers Union, Campaign for America's Future, Democracy Initiative, Center for Popular Democracy, Communications Workers of America, Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Every Voice, Food & Water Watch, Franciscan Action Network, Free Speech for People, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America, Jobs With Justice, the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church; the NAACP, Oil Change International, Public Citizen, Sierra Club, the United Church of Christ, the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, We Are Casa, the Yes Men and 350.org.

Source

A report released Tuesday by the Center for Popular Democracy and the Milwaukee youth group Leaders Igniting Transformation paints a much more troubling picture.According to the report, in the 2016-2017 school year, Milwaukee Public Schools suspended 10,267 students, including one of every three ninth-graders. The Milwaukee Police Department has 12 dedicated officers assigned to public schools and another six deployed on the streets to take truant students into custody. That’s in addition to 269 school safety assistants, the city’s version of school resource officers. That deployment costs Milwaukee taxpayers more than $15 million a year, but it comes at an even greater social cost.

Read the full article here.

WISN 12 ABC - November 11, 2014, by Patrick Gillespie - The economy might be improving, but Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen can't catch a break.

Conservatives in Congress demanded an audit of the Fed last month. Now liberals have their list of grievances.

A coalition led by the left-leaning Center for Popular Democracy has launched a "Fed Up" campaign. They say the Fed is out of touch with Main Street and isn't focusing enough on getting people back to work.

America's central bank has a dual mandate to keep prices of goods stable and get the economy to full employment.

The coalition sent a public letter to Yellen on Tuesday calling for "public engagement" in the selection of the replacements for two regional Fed Presidents who are resigning. Dallas Fed President Richard Fischer and Philadelphia Fed President Charles Plosser are leaving their posts soon.

Yellen will meet with three dozen coalition representatives on Friday.

The timing of the demands is a bit odd. Since taking over as Fed chair in early 2014, Yellen has repeatedly stressed that full employment and higher wages are among her top goals.

America's unemployment rate is now at a six-year low. The economy added another 214,000 jobs in October and is on track for its best year of jobs gains since 1999. Wages, however, have not improved since the recession.

"We continue to hear reports that the economy is recovering, but millions of workers and their families are still struggling, whether from involuntarily part-time hours, poverty wages, or a lack of earned sick time," said Ady Barkan, a staff attorney at the Center for Popular Democracy.

Both conservative and liberal groups say their aim is simply for more transparency at the Fed, although there is concern about politics impacting the central bank.

The Fed's decisions on interest rates which influence everything from mortgage rates to the bond market are intended to be free of outside influence.

In October, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, led the conservative critics and said the Fed should be audited by a Congressional oversight office. Two auditors already look at the Fed's finances every year, but Cruz wants closer scrutiny of whether the Fed made the right monetary policy choices.

Yellen and Cruz have not scheduled a meeting, although Yellen appears before Congress twice a year.

Source

WASHINGTON — One of the longest economic expansions in American history remains so fragile that the Federal Reserve said on Thursday it would postpone any retreat from its stimulus campaign.

Janet L. Yellen, the Fed’s chairwoman, described the decision as a close call and said the central bank still expected to raise interest rates later this year. The Fed has kept its benchmark interest rate close to zero since late 2008, when the nation’s economy was at the depths of crisis.

“The recovery from the Great Recession has advanced sufficiently far and domestic spending has been sufficiently robust that an argument can be made for a rise in interest rates at this time,” Ms. Yellen said at a news conference.

But, she said, “heightened uncertainties abroad,” including the Chinese economy’s weakness, had persuaded the bank to wait at least a few more weeks for fresh data that might “bolster its confidence” in continued growth.

The Fed’s decision, announced after a two-day meeting of its policy-making committee, had been widely expected by investors in recent weeks.

Fed officials spent most of the summer suggesting that they wanted to raise rates in September, only to lose confidence as signs of slowing global growth weighed on markets.

The 10-year Treasury note yield fell 0.11 percentage points to 2.189 percent. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index dropped 0.26 percent to 1,990.20.

There were signs, however, that the Fed might hesitate only briefly. It separately released economic projections showing 13 of the 17 officials on the Federal Open Market Committee still expected to raise the benchmark rate this year.

The Fed has said it is moving toward raising rates because it expects economic growth to continue, reducing unemployment and eventually raising inflation; on Thursday, Ms. Yellen said that outlook had not changed.

“There’s a tendency among some to think that they’re always going to get cold feet, and I thought Yellen really as much as possible discouraged that kind of thinking,” said John L. Bellows, a portfolio manager at Western Asset Management.

The policy-making committee still has scheduled meetings in October and December, and Ms. Yellen said a rate increase was possible at either meeting.

One official, Jeffrey M. Lacker, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, in Virginia, voted to raise rates at the September meeting, the first dissent this year. The economic projections suggest that Ms. Yellen faces more disagreements at the Fed’s October meeting, given that six officials predicted the Fed would raise rates at least two times this year, while four said that they expected no increases.

The latest postponement was welcomed by liberal activists and economists who argue that the recovery remains incomplete. Representative John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan, introduced legislation on Thursday directing the Fed to push the unemployment rate below 4 percent. While the bill has no chance of winning approval in the Republican-controlled Congress, Mr. Conyers addressed a rally organized by the Center for Popular Democracy outside an office building where Ms. Yellen spoke, joining in a chant of “Don’t raise interest rates.”

Critics expressed concern that the Fed has adopted increasingly ambitious goals for its stimulus campaign. “There is always a reason to chicken out,” said Dean Croushore, a professor of economics at the University of Richmond. “The Fed will lose credibility over time, as it fails to follow its own prior announcements about when it will increase rates.”

Ms. Yellen, asked about the efforts to put public pressure on the Fed, which have mounted in recent months, dryly observed, “We have been receiving advice from a large number of economists and interested groups.”

She denied that outside pressure had influenced the Fed’s decision. She also said it had not been influenced by concerns about a potential government shutdown, which could disrupt growth, though she said that it “would be more than unfortunate.”

The Fed’s decision is probably a “mixed blessing” for the global economy,” Eswar S. Prasad, an economics professor at Cornell, said in an email. Instead of new pressures, investors must deal with continued uncertainty.

A Fed increase, for example, might have prompted investors to pull money out of countries like Turkey or Brazil, damaging their economies, and reduced demand for imports from Europe and other developed countries. But the decision to stand pat also could weigh on Europe in the short term if it causes the euro to rise against the dollar, making things harder for exporters.

The American economy is outpacing the rest of the world, and Ms. Yellen said on Thursday that the Fed did not yet see evidence that growth was slowing.

Fed officials say they believe that labor market conditions have nearly returned to normal. In the new round of economic projections, officials estimated unemployment would stabilize next year at 4.8 percent, just below the August level of 5.1 percent.

Officials also remain confident that inflation will rebound, although perhaps a little slowly because of the recent downturn in the prices of oil and other commodities. Since the financial crisis, inflation has remained consistently below the central bank’s 2 percent annual target, lately rising just 0.3 percent over the previous year.

Fed officials argue that a tighter labor market will lead to higher inflation as employers are finally prodded to pay higher wages. But, Ms. Yellen said on Thursday, that will happen more slowly than the unemployment rate might suggest, because people not counted among the unemployed — like those who have stopped looking for work or have taken part-time jobs — may start looking again as conditions improve.

James A. Wilcox, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, said that it was difficult to find evidence for a strong connection between inflation and employment, particularly over the last decade. Inflation fell less than expected during the recession, and it has increased less than expected in the aftermath.

“The events of the last 10 years have caused a lot of rethinking and stomach acid within the Federal Reserve and the research community,” Dr. Wilcox said.

Recent history has reinforced the more basic point that it takes a lot to change the underlying pace of inflation. That stability has allowed the Fed to press its stimulus campaign, but Dr. Wilcox said it also provided a good reason for the Fed to be wary of allowing inflation to climb, because reversing the trend could be very painful.

“If the heat builds slowly, and it can only be turned down slowly, then you have to move ahead of time,” he said. “That’s why there’s sympathy for the idea of starting to raise rates relatively soon.”

Given the weakness of economic growth, however, Ms. Yellen reiterated on Thursday that the Fed planned to raise rates more slowly than its past practice. Fed officials expect the benchmark rate to reach 2.6 percent by the end of 2017.

In June, they predicted the rate would reach 2.9 percent. Officials also expect the rate to reach a new plateau of about 3.5 percent, less than the June prediction of 3.8 percent and significantly below the level once regarded as normal. Such a low plateau would limit the Fed’s ability to respond to economic downturns.

The Fed has already held its benchmark rate near zero much longer than it once expected. It announced in 2012 that it would keep rates near zero at least until the unemployment rate fell below 6.5 percent. That threshold was crossed in April 2014.

Last winter, when the Fed ended its bond-buying campaign, officials pointed to June as the most likely moment for “liftoff” from the so-called zero bound.

Some officials have made clear they are not inclined to wait much longer.

Stanley Fischer, vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, warned in late August that officials would not be able to postpone a decision until all doubts were resolved. “When the case is overwhelming,” he said, “if you wait that long, then you’ve waited too long.”

Ms. Yellen echoed that warning on Thursday. “We don’t want to wait until we’ve fully met both of our objectives to tighten monetary policy,” she said.

The Fed’s hesitation on Thursday echoed events of two years ago, when investors expected the central bank to announce at its September 2013 meeting that it was tapering its bond purchases. The Fed demurred, citing uncertainty about economic conditions.

Instead of September, it acted in December.

Source: New York Times