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A group of Democratic senators and House members complained Thursday that the Federal Reserve has failed to meet its obligation to build a diverse leadership that includes enough women and minorities, and it wants Chair Janet Yellen to remedy the issue.

The lawmakers said a more inclusive leadership that properly reflects gender, race, ethnicity, occupation and economic background is needed to ensure fairness in Fed policy.

The Democratic lawmakers — 11 senators and 116 in the House — expressed their concerns in a letter to Yellen. The Fed's leadership "remains overwhelmingly and disproportionately white and male," they wrote.

In its search for directors who oversee the Fed's 12 regional banks for terms next year, the Fed's board of governors should cast a wider net for African American, Latino and female candidates, as well as qualified people from labor, consumer and community organizations, the lawmakers told Yellen.

A Fed spokesman, David Skidmore, responded that the central bank is "committed to fostering diversity — by race, ethnicity, gender and professional background — within its leadership ranks."

"We have focused considerable attention in recent years on recruiting directors with diverse backgrounds and experiences," Skidmore said. "By law, we consider the interests of agriculture, commerce, industry, services, labor and consumers. We also are aiming to increase ethnic and gender diversity."

The senators signing the letter include Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who is challenging front-runner Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination. Warren and Sanders are the most outspoken Democratic critics on economic and financial issues.

The 116 House members, representing more than half the 188 Democrats in the House, are led by Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee.

The letter cites data from the Center for Popular Democracy, a liberal advocacy group. The data indicates that 83 percent of the directors who supervise the Fed's regional banks are white and that nearly three-quarters of them are men. All the members of the Fed's committee that sets interest-rate policy are white, and 60 percent are men.

The Fed counters that the proportion of minority directors on the boards of its regional banks and their branches has risen from 16 percent in 2010 to 24 percent this year, and that the proportion of female directors has increased from 23 percent to 30 percent. Forty-six percent of the directors represent diversity in race and-or gender, the Fed said.

"We are striving to continue that progress," Skidmore said.

The data cited in the congressional letter do not include directors of the regional banks' branches, only the banks themselves.

On Thursday, Clinton's campaign said she shares the lawmakers' concerns. A spokesman, Jesse Ferguson, said Clinton thinks "the Fed needs to be more representative of America as a whole." She also believes there no longer should be three private-sector bankers sitting on each regional Fed bank board, Ferguson said.

That change would require new legislation.

Yellen, the first woman to lead the central bank in its 100-plus-year history, has stressed in her public statements the importance of overcoming economic inequality.

The five current Fed governors are white. Two, including Yellen, are women.

By MARCY GORDON

Source

Corporate Backers of Hate campaign calls on companies to end practices that benefit from Trump's agenda...

Read full article here.

Source: Vox

For black communities in the United States, presidential election participation rates are strong and momentum is building.

In 2012, black voters showed up at the polls in the largest numbers (66.2 percent) and voted at a higher rate than non-Hispanic whites (64.1 percent) for the first time since rates were published by the U.S. Census Bureau in 1996.

Black Americans tend to vote Democratic in presidential elections. This was true by historic margins in President Barack Obama's 2008 and 2012 victories— 95 and 93 percent, respectively. And their turnout rate in 2016 could be an important factor in deciding the next president of the United States, especially in a tight race.

That's good news for black community leaders who want to ensure their voices are heard and hold future leaders accountable. 

Civil rights leadership

The 2014 and 2015 cases of deadly police force against unarmed African-Americans have galvanized a tech-savvy generation of activists to inject new life in an age-old push for racial, economic and social equality.

More and more, movements such as Black Lives Matter are becoming international household names and are holding candidates accountable to specifically address and push for legislation on these issues.

One such organization, Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI), engages and advocates on behalf of African-American and black immigrant communities on issues of racial justice and immigrant rights.

BAJI's policy and legal manager, Carl Lipscombe, says part of the greater push nationwide to organize and bring to light instances of police brutality results from what he describes as a community-wide fear of "being killed when walking to the corner." He says these police cases are enhanced by the advent of social media and by the ability to capture events on camera that wasn't possible in the 1980s.

Lipscombe says candidates must do more than "throw a bone" if they expect communities of color to go to the polls in droves.

"It's not enough to just say we want free education for everyone," Lipscombe said. "We want to know how this is going to impact black people."

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate among blacks in the United States, at 9.4 percent, remains significantly higher — nearly double — than the overall rate of 5 percent nationwide.

Black wealth also has declined. The non-partisan Economic Policy Institute, in coordination with the liberal research institution Center for Popular Democracy, reports that black workers' wages have fallen by 44 cents on the hour in the past 15 years, while wages of both Hispanic and white workers have increased by approximately the same amount.

African immigrant concerns

The Migration Policy Institute reports that black immigrants from Africa are better educated than the overall U.S. population, age 25 and older.

In 2007, 38 percent held a four-year degree or more, compared to 27 percent of the U.S. population. Yet, black immigrants earn lower wages and hold the highest unemployment rate in comparison to other immigrant groups, according to the Center for American Progress.

Bakary Tandia, case manager and policy advocate at African Services Committee, a Harlem-based agency dedicated to assisting African immigrants, refugees and asylees, says progress is necessary across all levels of government.

"Even if you take the case of [New York City Mayor Bill] de Blasio,” Tandia said, “he is a progressive mayor, but in his administration, I have not seen any African immigrant appointed or in a meaningful position, and the same thing goes at the state level, at the federal level."

New leadership

Grass-roots coordinators say anti-immigration rhetoric among some presidential candidates has fueled electoral participation, as well as greater community leadership.

Steve McFarland, whose organizing efforts include get-out-the-vote campaigns among disenfranchised communities in New York, says the immigration reform movement, combined with the work of Black Lives Matter, has produced a new generation of civil rights leaders.

"It doesn't look the way that it used to look," McFarland said. "It's not big organizations, but they can mobilize people, they have a clear voice, and they are winning changes across the country."

Ahead of the 2016 presidential primaries, there is good news for Democratic frontrunner and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. She currently enjoys an 80 percent favorability rating among adult blacks, the highest positive net rating of all candidates, according to a recent Gallup poll.

Clinton, who has met privately with Black Lives Matters activists, specifically addressed racial profiling in an October speech at Clark Atlanta University.

"Race still plays a significant role in determining who gets ahead in America and who gets left behind," Clinton said. "Racial profiling is wrong, demanding, doesn't keep us safe or help solve crimes. It's time to put that practice behind us."

Truthout - March 2, 2015, by Dean Baker - There is an enormous amount of political debate over various pieces of legislation that are supposed to be massive job killers. For example, Republicans lambasted President Obama’s increase in taxes on the wealthy back in 2013 as a job killer. They endlessly have condemned the Affordable Care Act as a jobs killer. The same is true of proposals to raise the minimum wage.

While there is great concern in Washington over these and other imaginary job killers, the Federal Reserve Board is openly mapping out an actual job killing strategy and drawing almost no attention at all for it. The Fed’s job killing strategy centers on its plan to start raising interest rates, which is generally expected to begin at some point this year.

The Fed’s plans to raise interest rates are rarely spoken of as hurting employment, but job-killing is really at the center of the story. The rationale for raising interest rates is that inflation could begin to pick up and start to exceed the Fed’s current 2.0 percent target, if the Fed doesn’t slow the economy with higher interest rates.

Higher interest rates slow the economy by discouraging people from borrowing to buy homes or cars. They will also have some effect in discouraging businesses from investing. With reduced demand from these sectors, businesses will hire fewer workers. This will weaken the labor market, which means workers have less bargaining power. If workers have less bargaining power, they will be less well-situated to get pay increases. And if wages are not rising there will be less inflationary pressure in the economy.

The potential impact of Fed rate hikes on jobs is large. Suppose the Fed raises interest rates enough to shave 0.2 percentage points off the growth rate, say pushing growth for the year down from 2.4 percent to 2.2 percent. If we assume employment growth drops roughly in proportion to GDP growth, this would imply a reduction in the rate of job growth of almost 10 percent. If the economy would have otherwise created 2.4 million jobs over the course of the year, the Fed’s rate hikes would have cost the economy more than 200,000 jobs in this scenario.

For comparison purposes, we are having a big fight over the Keystone pipeline. The proponents of the pipeline point to the jobs created by building a pipeline as an important justification, even if the oil being pumped through the pipeline may cause enormous damage to the environment. According to the State Department’s analysis, building the pipeline would create 21,000 for two years. This pipeline related jobs gain has been widely touted in the media and is supposed to make it difficult for many members of Congress to go along with President Obama in opposing Keystone.

Yet, the Fed can easily destroy ten times as many jobs with a set of interest rate hikes this year with its actions passing largely unnoticed. In fact, the impact of Fed interest rate hikes on jobs can easily be far larger than this 200,000 number. If the Fed decides that the unemployment rate should not fall below a certain level (5.4 percent is a number is often used), then it could be costing the economy millions of jobs if the economy could actually sustain a considerably lower level of unemployment as it did in the late 1990s.

To be clear, Federal Reserve Board Chair Janet Yellen and her colleagues on the Fed’s Open Market Committee (FOMC) that determines interest rates are not evil people sitting around figuring out how to ruin the lives of American workers. The Fed has a legal mandate to control inflation, in addition to its mandate to sustain high levels of unemployment. If they raise interest rates it will be because they fear inflationary pressures will build if they let the economy continue to grow and unemployment to fall.

But this is inevitably a judgment call. The call is based on both their assessment of the risk of inflation and also the relative harm from higher rates of inflation as opposed to higher rates of unemployment. It is likely that the members of the FOMC, who largely come from the financial industry, are much more concerned about inflation than the population as a whole. They are also likely to be less concerned about unemployment. These are people who tend to read about unemployment in the data, not to see it themselves or among their friends and family members.

This is why it is important that the public be paying attention to the Fed’s interest rate policies and let them know how they feel about raising interest rates to kill jobs. The Center for Popular Democracy has organized an impressive grassroots campaign around the Fed’s interest rate policies. Those who don’t want to see the government deliberately trying to kill jobs might want to join in.Source