CPD IN THE NEWS

Source: The New Republic 

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.”

Shaheim Wright's house is falling apart. It's infested with bedbugs. The washing machine is broken. He needs a new sink. Oh, and there's the crack in the bathtub.

"It's leaking out, and right near my door is a wet spot from water coming down," Wright said. "And it's like, well I can't pay for any of this."

Read the full article here.

Ed Week - March 3, 2015, by Arianna Prothero - A national poll of U.S. voters finds that although a majority of voters support charter schools, they aren't necessarily in favor of expanding them.

The survey, conducted for In the Public Interest and the Center for Popular Democracy—two groups involved in education policy and skeptical of charters—found participants largely favor charter school reform proposals such as requiring open board meetings, regular audits, and policies to help shield district schools from the impact of charter schools opening up nearby.

The two organizations are partnering to push a series of charter school accountability proposals. The initiative, called the Charter School Accountability Agenda, was unveiled in tandem with the poll results and quickly received support from the American Federation of Teachers, one of the two national teachers' unions. The proposals are based off of a September report released from Brown University's Annenberg Institute for School Reform. 

However, the survey also found that lack of school choice falls last on a list of education concerns, including issues such as class-size and parental involvement.

Sixty-two percent of those surveyed said they either wanted the number of charter schools in their area maintained or reduced.

Forty-four percent said they favored charter schools when asked without a description of what charters are, but that number climbed to 52 percent when participants were provided a description. Eighteen percent said they opposed charter schools when not given a definition, and 38 percent said they opposed charter schools after seeing a description.

When asked if charter schools are public or private schools, 30 percent said the former and 58 percent checked the latter.

Those results are somewhat reminiscent of another poll conducted recently by Gallup, which found strong support for charter schools even though many people didn't really understand how charters work.

The public polling firm GBA Strategies surveyed 1,000 people, selected randomly from a national voter file, on behalf of the Center for Popular Democracy and In the Public Interest. You can dig into more of the survey results here.

Source

Dustin Moskovitz and his wife, Cari Tuna, have become billionaires since he started the behemoth social networking site with his former Harvard University roommate Mark Zuckerberg. (Moskovitz left the company in 2008 to found Asana, which streamlines task management). The couple is bringing Silicon Valley-style analytics to the world of philanthropy through their fund, Good Ventures.

The goal is to find and incubate projects with the potential to create the most change for every dollar of funding. Many of the fund’s initiatives tread traditional charitable ground. Good Ventures has backed research on the connection between crime, cannabis and incarceration and helped stop the spread of drug-resistant malarial parasites in Myanmar.

But the group is also broadening its reach into public policy issues, including macroeconomics. It has granted $850,000 to the Center for Popular Democracy over the past year to fund a campaign urging the Fed not to raise its target interest rate until the economy is much stronger. Good Ventures is the single largest backer of the campaign -- dubbed Fed Up -- whose budget this year is about $1 million.

“The central reason we believe that marginally more dovish Fed policy relative to the current baseline would carry net benefits is that, at roughly their current rates, we see unemployment as more costly in humanitarian terms than inflation,” Good Ventures wrote explaining its decision to fund the project. “Dovish” policy generally supports lower interest rates, while a “hawkish” stance would raise them.

The funding has helped the group expand its presence at an annual symposium of economic elite that kicked off Thursday here in the foothills of the Grand Tetons and sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. The group arrived at the conference last year with a handful of workersholding up signs and wearing green T-shirts.

This year, Fed Up held “teach-ins” in a meeting room at the same hotel as the Fed’s conference and drew prominent economists such as Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, University of California-Berkeley professor Brad DeLong and Center for Economic and Policy Research Co-Director Dean Baker.

The campaign also flew in dozens of workers to underscore the disparity in the nation’s economic recovery. Wage growth has remained stagnant for years, and unemployment among black and Hispanic workers is significantly higher than that of whites.

“An economy that doesn’t deliver for most of its citizens is a failed economy,” Stiglitz said in a press conference in Jackson Hole.

Monetary policy has not traditionally been subject to populist activism, and Good Ventures acknowledges that the success of the campaign is uncertain at best. Fed Up is also working to increase public input in the selection of regional Fed presidents, an effort that Good Ventures rates as more unequivocably positive and, at the very least, easier to measure.

But, the funders note, if the campaign works -- and if easy money is indeed the way to go -- the payoff could be massive:

Our best guess is that the campaign is unlikely to have an impact on the Fed's monetary policy, but that if it does, the benefits from a tighter labor market would be very large; we think this small chance of a large positive impact is sufficient to justify the grant.

However, this is an unusually complex policy area, and we could be mistaken.

Source: Washington Post