CPD IN THE NEWS

If a commission discovered “any wrongdoing, any corruption, any malice in that corruption,” added Julio Lopez Varona of the Center for Popular Democracy’s Puerto Rico programs, “then people should go to jail.” In his view that includes not just federal officials but local Puerto Rican officials, some of whom have come under fire for mismanaging the disaster and recovery. But Mark-Viverito notes that it is far too early to think about how to enact punishments on individuals.

WFMZ-TV – August 20, 2013, by Will Lewis -

ALLENTOWN, Pa. – A group rallying for immigration reform is taking its message to Lehigh Valley Congressman Charlie Dent and other Republicans. They want action now but no action will be taken until Congressional leaders return to Washington in September.

“I am one of millions of children that had to be separated from their parents because of a broken immigration system,” said Tatiana Tooley, a community activist speaking to the group.

This group hopes Senate Bill 744, immigration reform, is the first topic Congress discusses.

“If the GOP supports this, the GOP is making a statement that they truly value family unity,” added Tooley.

Lehigh Valley Congressman Charlie Dent says he does support immigration reform. He also knows the issue is a complicated one.

“Immigration reform will be dealt with,” said Dent. “It will be dealt with a bit differently than the Senate which chose to take up one massive bill. The House will deal with this in pieces.”

Senate Bill 744 has already passed and some wish congressional leaders would look at that piece of legislation first before coming up with a new set of rules.

“If they have another bill it will take more time,” said organizer, Fernando Vazquez.

“We’ve gotten away from a dialogue and we’ve polarized on not only this issue but a lot of issues,” said Allentown Mayor Ed Pawlowski. “We’ve polarized on one side or the other. that’s not how good government works.”

The people say waiting means more children separated from their families, and more people waiting to live the American dream.

“We have to deal with this thing responsibly,” said Dent. “I think we can and I think we can get there. But it’s going to be a lot of work.”

“The new leader could be Charlie Dent and one way to show leadership is passing this bill,” added Vazquez. “Because many people will vote for a Republicans, they need to remember that.

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Taipei Times - November 16, 2014 - US labor and community organizers meeting with US Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen challenged officials who are ready to raise interest rates to first come visit the poorest neighborhoods with them before saying that the economy has recovered.

Kati Sipp, one of about two dozen activists meeting Yellen, said at a press conference on Friday in front of the central bank in Washington that she would show Philadelphia Fed President Charles Plosser “what life is like in this economy” for his city’s unemployed.

“Clearly Charles Plosser hasn’t been coming out the way that I work,” Pennsylvania Working Families director Sipp said. “I work on 60th Street in West Philadelphia in a storefront office and every single day someone or a couple of people come in to my office because they are looking for work.”

Members of the group met with Yellen and Fed governors Stanley Fischer, Jerome Powell and Lael Brainard. The coalition of 20 community groups, labor unions and religious leaders from around the US wants the Fed to hear the concerns of ordinary US residents as it prepares to raise rates. It is part of wider public pressure, including from legislators of both parties, who want more accountability and transparency from the central bank.

The Fed has been criticized by Democratic and Republican party groups over its rescue of big Wall Street banks in the financial crisis that began in 2008, and over subsequent steps to support the economy through zero interest rates and massive bond purchases.

The group meeting with Yellen and her colleagues on Friday included individuals struggling to find work despite the improving economic picture in the US, Ady Barkan, senior staff attorney at the Brooklyn-based Center for Popular Democracy, one of the organizers of the meeting, said in an interview.

“They all listened very intently and asked questions,” Barkan said of Yellen and the three governors. “They were very interested in hearing about the personal stories of the folks we brought.”

Barkan said Rounds told the Fed officials that “sky-high unemployment” in the St Louis area had contributed to “desperation” in the town.

Another speaker was Shemethia Butler, an unemployed woman from Washington. She recounted for Yellen how she was laid off from a job that offered no paid sick days after becoming ill and missing time at work, Barkan said.

The jobless rate has fallen to 5.8 percent from a 26-year high of 10 percent in October 2009. Interest rates have been held near zero since December 2008 and most Fed officials project that they will raise borrowing costs sometime next year.

Still, millions of US citizens can find only part-time work, while average hourly wages have risen at about a 2 percent pace for the past five years, barely outpacing inflation.

“The economy is not working for the vast majority of people,” Barkan told reporters before the meeting in front of the central bank headquarters facing the National Mall. “It’s too important of an institution to be controlled and dominated by big banks and corporations, rather than the public.”

In addition to low rates to help the unemployed, the groups are pushing for a more open and transparent search process for regional bank presidents that includes more community input. Barkan said the group asked Yellen for support in arranging meetings with each regional Fed president.

While formal changes to the process of selecting regional Fed leaders would require legislation, Barkan said the Fed board of governors held significant informal influence over the process.

“I’m sure they could change the process if they wanted to,” he said.

Plosser and Richard Fisher of Dallas both plan to retire next year and the “Fed Up” coalition wants more public input in naming their successors. Both banks have said they have hired executive search firms to find candidates.

Economist Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, said the Fed’s willingness to arrange the meeting was “incredibly encouraging” because the central bank “is one of the most important institutions in the world, but few Americans know it.”

While the unemployment rate has declined to a six-year low, there remains “too large a gap between today and a healthy economy,” he said, adding that stakes are highest for disadvantaged groups, including African-Americans. Their unemployment rate tends to be twice as high as the broader US level both “in good times and in bad,” Bivens said.

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Vox - August 22, 2014, by Dylan Matthews - The Jackson Hole conference, an annual retreat in Wyoming organized by the Kansas City Fed, is usually frequented by central bankers, private sector economists, and academics. It's not usually frequented by everyday workers.

This year was differrent. A group of community activists traveled to the conference to urge policymakers to not do what an increasing number of voices in the Fed system and in the financial sector have been urging them to do: raise interest rates.

"They need to stimulate the economy," says Kendra Brooks, a former bank manager from Philadelphia who's been unemployed for about a year. "Increasing the interest rate here isn't going to help the people without jobs. It's going to put us further into debt."

"I want to at least get our voices heard before they make their decisions,"Tyrone Raino, who recently took a job requiring a 40 mile commute from his home in Minneapolis, says.

Brooks and Raino are both members of local community organizing groups — Minnesota Neighborhoods Organizing for Change and Action United in Philadelphia, respectively — which have, with the Center for Popular Democracy, come together to try to do something that hasn't really been done before: grassroots lobbying of the Fed. And they're being heard.

According to the Center's senior attorney, Ady Barkan, the group met with Kansas Fed chief Esther George for two hours, and spoke to Fed chair Janet Yellen, Chicago Fed chief Charles Evans, and Minneapolis Fed chief Narayana Kocherlakota. The last three are sympathetic to Brooks and Raino's perspective — Raino called Kocherlakota "one of the voices in the Federal Reserve system who understands the economy is far from recovery for most of us" in an article for MinnPost — George has expressed support for raising interest rates. For people trying to lobby a generally unlobbied institution, that's an impressive start.

To some extent, the Fed is designed to be impervious to outside pressure like this. Many economists believe that central bank independence — that is, having a central bank that is not directly controlled by legislatures or other democratically elected officials — is crucial to effective monetary policy. In 1993, future Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and his Harvard colleague Alberto Alesina authored a hugely influential paper arguing that countries with more independent banks have less variable prices and lower inflation overall. While that finding was controversial, the view that month-to-month policy decisions by the Fed should not be influenced by politicians — what Fed vice chair Stanley Fischer has called"instrument independence" — is widely accepted.

But Barkan argues that the independence the Fed currently enjoys is one-sided. "There are 108 board members across the 12 regional banks," he notes. "Under the law, 72 of them are supposed to represent the public interest and 36 are supposed to represent banking and financial interests. But of the 108, 97 are from financial institutions or corporations. Only 9 are from nonprofits, and even those are from major, wealthy nonprofits. Only 2 of the 108 board members represent labor organizations and workers."

"This desire for Fed independence really only goes in one direction," he concludes. "It's a desire for insulation from the needs of regular people."

Barkan, Brooks, and Raino avoid endorsing specific proposals for the Fed to get tougher on unemployment, like setting a nominal GDP target or abolishing paper money or allowing "helicopter drops." The emphasis is more on convincing the Fed that there is still a problem — that the labor market still has slack.

While some in the Fed worry that people are getting too many raises, Barkan argues that wage growth is still too slow — and that the labor market won't be healthy until it's significantly higher. "Real rising wages will represent tightening of the labor markets, and that's what you want to pull the long-term unemployed back into the market, and vulnerable workers back into the market," he says. "It's only once the labor market tightens that you can help vulnerable communities get out of this long recession."

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