The Fed has a rare chance to prove it's not Wall Street's bank
The Fed has a rare chance to prove it's not Wall Street's bank
William Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, is retiring early, creating another vacancy at a...
William Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, is retiring early, creating another vacancy at a central bank already in a flux of personnel changes. Here’s a suggestion to the the New York Fed’s board of directors, which will select Dudley’s successor: Try to avoid picking another banker.
Read the full article here.
Struggle and the State
Today's Dig is a very good and somewhat unusual Dig: Dan’s got two interviews with two different people. First,...
Today's Dig is a very good and somewhat unusual Dig: Dan’s got two interviews with two different people. First, journalist Eric Blanc on the teacher strike wave that he's been covering for Jacobin. Then comes the Center for Popular Democracy's Xiomara Caro Diaz on last week's May Day demonstrations against austerity in Puerto Rico.
Listen to the episode here.
Fed Up Campaign Celebrates Victory for Working Families as Fed Holds Off on Rate Hikes
“This is a victory for the working families who stepped up with innovative organizing to send the Fed a clear message:...
“This is a victory for the working families who stepped up with innovative organizing to send the Fed a clear message: Our voices belong in the debate about our economy,” said Ady Barkan, Campaign Director for Fed Up. “With the recovery still far too weak in too many communities, it would have been economically devastating – and immoral – to slow the economy.”
“We applaud Chair Yellen and the Federal Reserve for resisting the pressure being put on them to intentionally slow down the economy. Weak wage growth proves that the labor market is still very far from full employment. And with inflation still below the Fed’s already low target, there is simply no reason to raise interest rates anytime soon. Across America, working families know that the economy still has not recovered. We hope that the Fed continues to look at the data and refrain from any rate hikes until we reach genuine full employment for all, particularly for the Black and Latino communities who are being left behind in this so-called recovery.
The campaign held a rally outside the building where Chair Janet Yellen made the announcement this afternoon. Fifty workers gathered to tell their stories and call on the Fed not to intentionally slow down the economy. They were joined by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), who introduced today the Full Employment Federal Reserve Act of 2015, which would enhance the Fed’s full employment mandate.
Throughout late 2014 and 2015, the Fed Up campaign has elevated the voices of working families, meeting with four of the five Fed Governors and six of the twelve regional Fed presidents. Workers across the country have talked about the tremendous racial and economic disparities that still afflict the economy, and the need for genuine full employment that creates rising wages and more jobs for all communities. It has enlisted the support of economists like Nobel Laureate Joe Stiglitz, the involvement of four of the nation’s largest progressive digital advocacy organizations, and over 120,000 supporters around the country.
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The Center for Popular Democracy promotes equity, opportunity, and a dynamic democracy in partnership with innovative base-building organizations, organizing networks and alliances, and progressive unions across the country. CPD builds the strength and capacity of democratic organizations to envision and advance a pro-worker, pro-immigrant, racial justice agenda.
What the Overworked and Underemployed Have in Common
Huffington Post - October 7, 2014, by Robin Hardman - One morning last week I joined a small gathering in a conference...
Huffington Post - October 7, 2014, by Robin Hardman - One morning last week I joined a small gathering in a conference room at New York City's Baruch College to listen to a line-up of speakers and panelists talk on the subject of "Families and Flexibility." The event was sponsored by Scott Stringer, our NYC Comptroller, who has been promoting city-wide "right to request" legislation. In case you've missed them, right to request laws, currently on the books in many countries around the world and very slowly gaining traction here in the U.S., provide employees with the simple right to request a flexible schedule. Details--including who can ask and for what reasons, and how much leeway employers have in responding-- vary, but laws are already in place in San Francisco and Vermont, and legislation is pending in many other places--including the U.S. Congress.
Hence this event, which gave Comptroller Stringer an opportunity to strut his stuff; featured a closing keynote by Anne-Marie Slaughter, President and CEO of the New America Foundation; and allowed a number of smart policy-makers, advocates, researchers, corporate work-life champions and workers to weigh in with their stories and data. But perhaps the most noticeable aspect of the morning was what I'll call the Great Divide between the two panels that made up the bulk of the agenda.
The first panel featured political scientist Janet Gornick; A Better Balance co-president Dina Bakst; Families and Work Institute's Kelly Sakai-O'Neill, and work-life/flex champions from two accounting firms: Marcee Harris Schwartz of BDO and Barbara Wankoff of KPMG. Moderated by New York Times reporter Rachel Swarns, the panelists conducted an interesting, data-driven discussion about why flexibility matters and the very real problems many professional men and women face achieving any kind of work-life "balance." The ideas and concerns they raised were the important stuff that is often stressed in our national work-life conversation: The business benefits of a more flexible workplace. The negative impact of overwork on both families and society at large. The dark-ages state of parental leave laws in this country, especially in comparison with pretty much every other country in the developed world.
We listened to and discussed these topics for a full hour, grabbed some more coffee, and moved on to the second panel. I wished I'd worn my sneakers: it was a dizzying leap across a conceptual chasm.
The second panel featured A Better Balance's other co-president, Sheery Leiwant, as well as sociologist Ruth Milkman and Carrie Gleason, Director of the Center for Popular Democracy's Fair Workweek Initiative. It also featured a woman named Deena Adams, a single parent who, shortly after receiving a service award for loyalty, lost her job because she couldn't find child care to accommodate a sudden requirement that she start taking on overnight shifts. (A fifth panelist, Carrie Nathan, is a union activist and hourly employee at Macy's, which apparently has an exceptionally supportive system for shift scheduling.)
At this panel, moderated by Times labor reporter, Steven Greenhouse, we heard about the other end of the spectrum. We heard about things not usually talked about in the context of work-life and not talked about enough in any context. In contrast to the (very real) problems of professional workers--so many of whom feel overworked and short on time--we now focused on the growing legions of workers who aspire, most of all, to have a full-time job. The exploitation of the underemployed has become something of a science in recent years, as technology provides elaborate algorithms that can tell employers on a day-to-day--sometimes hour-to-hour--basis exactly how many employees they need on site and how many they can just tell to stay home. Many employers use this hyper-efficiency to move workers about like pieces on a chessboard, expecting them to be on call for the next move, whenever it may come.
Please understand what this means: employees must be ready, sometimes forty hours a week, sometimes 24/7, to drop everything and show up for their minimum wage job. They have to have child care available; they can make no permanent social or vacation plans; they cannot take a class. Generally, all this readiness leads to far less than full-time work and yet by definition also makes it impossible to take a second job. One man quoted in an article by Greenhouse talked about being told in a job interview that he'd have to be on call full-time but would be able to work no more than 29 hours/week. When he objected, the interview was over. Another described asking his employer to schedule his "wildly fluctuating" 25 hours/week at the same time each day so could find a second job--and promptly had his weekly hours cut to 12. A woman commuted an hour to her scheduled shift only to be told to go home (with no pay)--she wasn't needed today.
The overworked, the underworked. The Great Divide. It's odd to wrap the phrase "work-life" around the situations of these two groups of people, yet it does apply to both. Each ultimately comes down to a lack of control over one's own time. Each apparently stems from employers' mistaken belief that providing a modicum of flexibility and predictability is bad for business (as if stressed-out employees and high turnover were good for the bottom line). Each affects more than just the people involved--it affects our families, our friends and our communities.
The good news is that some of the "right to request" existing and pending legislation around the country focuses not just on flexibility but also on predictability. The tools are at hand to make changes that affect men and women on both sides of the chasm. Did I mention that it's National Work and Family Month? Come on, people, let's get going.
Robin Hardman is a writer and work-life expert who works with companies to put together the best possible "great place to work" competition entries and creates compelling, easy-to-read benefits, HR, diversity and general-topic employee communications. Find her and follow her blog at www.robinhardman.com.
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What Does Black Lives Matter Want?
On August 1 the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), a coalition of over sixty organizations, rolled out “A Vision for...
On August 1 the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), a coalition of over sixty organizations, rolled out “A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom & Justice,” an ambitious document described by the press as the first signs of what young black activists “really want.” It lays out six demands aimed at ending all forms of violence and injustice endured by black people; redirecting resources from prisons and the military to education, health, and safety; creating a just, democratically controlled economy; and securing black political power within a genuinely inclusive democracy. Backing the demands are forty separate proposals and thirty-four policy briefs, replete with data, context, and legislative recommendations.
But the document quickly came under attack for its statement on Palestine, which calls Israel an apartheid state and characterizes the ongoing war in Gaza and the West Bank as genocide. Dozens of publications and media outlets devoted extensive coverage to the controversy around this single aspect of the platform, including The Guardian, the Washington Post, The Times of Israel, Haaretz, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Of course, M4BL is not the first to argue that Israeli policies meet the UN definitions of apartheid. (The 1965 International Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and the 1975 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid define it as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.”) Nor is M4BL the first group to use the term “genocide” to describe the plight of Palestinians under occupation and settlement. The renowned Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, for example, wrote of the war on Gaza in 2014 as “incremental genocide.” That Israel’s actions in Gaza correspond with the UN definition of genocide to “destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” by causing “serious bodily or mental harm” to group members is a legitimate argument to make.
The few mainstream reporters and pundits who considered the full M4BL document either reduced it to a laundry list of demands or positioned it as an alternative to the platform of the Democratic Party—or else focused on their own benighted astonishment that the movement has an agenda beyond curbing police violence. But anyone following Black Lives Matter from its inception in the aftermath of the George Zimmerman verdict should not be surprised by the document’s broad scope. Black Lives Matter founders Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi are veteran organizers with a distinguished record of fighting for economic justice, immigrant rights, gender equity, and ending mass incarceration. “A Vision for Black Lives” was not a response to the U.S. presidential election, nor to unfounded criticisms of the movement as “rudderless” or merely a hashtag. It was the product of a year of collective discussion, research, collaboration, and intense debate, beginning with the Movement for Black Lives Convening in Cleveland last July, which initially brought together thirty different organizations. It was the product of some of the country’s greatest minds representing organizations such as the Black Youth Project 100, Million Hoodies, Black Alliance for Just Immigration, Dream Defenders, the Organization for Black Struggle, and Southerners on New Ground (SONG). As Marbre Stahly-Butts, a leader of the M4BL policy table explained, “We formed working groups, facilitated multiple convenings, drew on a range of expertise, and sought guidance from grassroots organizations, organizers and elders. As of today, well over sixty organizations and hundreds of people have contributed to the platform.”
“A Vision for Black Lives” is a plan for ending structural racism, saving the planet, and transforming the entire nation—not just black lives.
The result is actually more than a platform. It is a remarkable blueprint for social transformation that ought to be read and discussed by everyone. The demands are not intended as Band-Aids to patch up the existing system but achievable goals that will produce deep structural changes and improve the lives of all Americans and much of the world. Thenjiwe McHarris, an eminent human rights activist and a principle coordinator of the M4BL policy table, put it best: “We hope that what has been created carries forward the legacy of our elders and our ancestors while imagining a world and a country profoundly different than what currently exists. For us and for those that will come after us.” The document was not drafted with the expectation that it will become the basis of a mass movement, or that it will replace the Democratic Party’s platform. Rather it is a vision statement for long-term, transformative organizing. Indeed, “A Vision for Black Lives” is less a political platform than a plan for ending structural racism, saving the planet, and transforming the entire nation—not just black lives.
If heeded, the call to “end the war on Black people” would not only reduce our vulnerability to poverty, prison, and premature death but also generate what I would call a peace dividend of billions of dollars. Demilitarizing the police, abolishing bail, decriminalizing drugs and sex work, and ending the criminalization of youth, transfolk, and gender-nonconforming people would dramatically diminish jail and prison populations, reduce police budgets, and make us safer. “A Vision for Black Lives” explicitly calls for divesting from prisons, policing, a failed war on drugs, fossil fuels, fiscal and trade policies that benefit the rich and deepen inequality, and a military budget in which two-thirds of the Pentagon’s spending goes to private contractors. The savings are to be invested in education, universal healthcare, housing, living wage jobs, “community-based drug and mental health treatment,” restorative justice, food justice, and green energy.
But the point is not simply to reinvest the peace dividend into existing social and economic structures. It is to change those structures—which is why “A Vision for Black Lives” emphasizes community control, self-determination, and “collective ownership” of certain economic institutions. It calls for community control over police and schools, participatory budgeting, the right to organize, financial and institutional support for cooperatives, and “fair development” policies based on human needs and community participation rather than market principles. Democratizing the institutions that have governed black communities for decades without accountability will go a long way toward securing a more permanent peace since it will finally end a relationship based on subjugation, subordination, and surveillance. And by insisting that such institutions be more attentive to the needs of the most marginalized and vulnerable—working people and the poor, the homeless, the formerly incarcerated, the disabled, women, and the LGBTQ community—“A Vision for Black Lives” enriches our practice of democracy.
For example, “A Vision for Black Lives” advocates not only closing tax loopholes for the rich but revising a regressive tax policy in which the poorest 20 percent of the population pays on average twice as much in taxes as the richest 1 percent. M4BL supports a massive jobs program for black workers, but the organization’s proposal includes a living wage, protection and support for unions and worker centers, and anti-discrimination clauses that protect queer and trans employees, the disabled, and the formerly incarcerated. Unlike the Democratic Party, M4BL does not subscribe to the breadwinner model of jobs as the sole source of income. It instead supports a universal basic income (UBI) that “would meet basic human needs,” eliminate poverty, and ensure “economic security for all.” This is not a new idea; some kind of guaranteed annual income has been fundamental to other industrializing nations with strong social safety nets and vibrant economies, and the National Welfare Rights Organization proposed similar legislation nearly a half century ago. The American revolutionary Thomas Paine argued in the eighteenth century for the right of citizens to draw a basic income from the levying of property tax, as Elizabeth Anderson recently reminded. Ironically, the idea of a basic income or “negative income tax” also won support from neoliberal economists Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek—although for very different reasons. Because eligibility does not require means testing, a UBI would effectively reduce the size of government by eliminating the bureaucratic machine of social workers and investigators who police the dispensation of entitlements such as food stamps and welfare. And by divesting from an unwieldy and unjust prison-industrial complex, there would be more than enough revenue to create good-paying jobs and provide a basic income for all.
Reducing the military is not just about resources; it is about ending war, at home and abroad. “A Vision for Black Lives” includes a devastating critique of U.S. foreign policy, including the escalation of the war on terror in Africa, machinations in Haiti, the recent coup in Honduras, ongoing support for Israel’s occupation of Palestine, and the role of war and free-trade policies in fueling the global refugee crisis. M4BL’s critique of U.S. militarism is driven by Love—not the uncritical love of flag and nation we saw exhibited at both major party conventions, but a love of global humanity. “The movement for Black lives,” one policy brief explains, “must be tied to liberation movements around the world. The Black community is a global diaspora and our political demands must reflect this global reality. As it stands funds and resources needed to realize domestic demands are currently used for wars and violence destroying communities abroad.”
Finally, a peace dividend can fund M4BL’s most controversial demand: reparations. For M4BL, reparations would take the form of massive investment in black communities harmed by past and present policies of exploitation, theft, and disinvestment; free and open access to lifetime education and student debt forgiveness; and mandated changes in the school curriculum that acknowledge the impact of slavery, colonialism, and Jim Crow in producing wealth and racial inequality. The latter is essential, since perhaps the greatest obstacle to reparations is the common narrative that American wealth is the product of individual hard work and initiative, while poverty results from misfortune, culture, bad behavior, or inadequate education. We have for too long had ample evidence that this is a lie. From generations of unfree, unpaid labor, from taxing black communities to subsidize separate but unequal institutions, from land dispossession and federal housing policies and corporate practices that conspire to keep housing values in black and brown communities significantly lower, resulting in massive loss of potential wealth—the evidence is overwhelming and incontrovertible. Structural racism is to blame for generations of inequality. Restoring some of that wealth in the form of education, housing, infrastructure, and jobs with living wages would not only begin to repair the relationship between black residents and the rest of the country, but also strengthen the economy as a whole.
To see how “A Vision for Black Lives” is also a vision for the country as a whole requires imagination. But it also requires seeing black people as fully human, as producers of wealth, sources of intellect, and as victims of crimes—whether the theft of our bodies, our labor, our children, our income, our security, or our psychological well-being. If we had the capacity to see structural racism and its consequences not as a black problem but as an American problem we have faced since colonial times, we may finally begin to hear what the Black Lives Matter movement has been saying all along: when all black lives are valued and the structures and practices that do harm to black communities are eliminated, we will change our country and possibly the world.
By By Robin D. G. Kelley
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Will last-minute work soon be history?
When Russell Miller worked at Abercrombie, one of his days each week had to be an on-call day. He wouldn’t know if he’...
When Russell Miller worked at Abercrombie, one of his days each week had to be an on-call day. He wouldn’t know if he’d have to show up to work until an hour in advance.
“You had to block out that time period as if you were working,” he says. One store he worked at was 45 minutes from his house. “We had to be ready to be there on time. With all the regulations about what we wear, how we look and how we present ourselves, I had to get fully ready for my shift and ready to walk out the door at the time I made the phone call to find out if they were even going to need me or not.”
For Miller, this was more than an inconvenience.
“Having a second job wouldn’t work at a time when I was scheduled for an on-call shift. If they scheduled me for an on-call shift and they didn’t call me, that was real money lost and real time opportunity lost.”
On-call scheduling “means you have to put your life on hold,” says Rachel Laforest, director of the Retail Action Project, a division of the Retail Wholesale and Department Stores Union. “It becomes very difficult to lead full lives, so for example, if I’m a parent and I have to figure out arranging for child care, it’s impossible for me to do that” with such short notice, she says.
There isn’t good national data on the prevalence of on-call scheduling, but regional surveys suggest it’s widespread and not limited to retail, says Stephanie Luce, professor of labor studies at CUNY. “We see it in fast food, airlines, beauty services, domestic services, child care services," she says. "Smaller studies seem to suggest this practice really picked up after the recession, however, over the past couple of years, there’s been a real push back.”
After New York’s attorney general suggested Abercrombie and 12 other companies were potentially violating New York law through the practice, Abercrombie announced it would work to discontinue the practice.
The company responded on August fifth “...we understand – and share – the attorney general’s concerns about call-in shift scheduling. The attorney general’s letter helped focus our ongoing internal discussions about how to create a stable and predictable work environment as possible for our employees.”
Gap Inc. told Marketplace: “Each of our brands have made a commitment to evaluate their practices and determine where we may be able to improve scheduling stability for our employees, while continuing to drive productivity in stores.”
Gap also says it’s working on a pilot project with University of California, Hastings College of the Law “to examine workplace scheduling and productivity. Led by recognized expert professor Joan Williams, the goal of the Gap Hourly Scheduling Initiative is to use research and data to create solutions that will be sustainable and can be implemented across our company’s entire footprint and fleet."
Under pressure from a lawsuit, Victoria’s Secret discontinued on-call scheduling earlier this year.
To the extent firms are reconsidering the practice, the reasons are both technological and monetary.
On-call scheduling resulted from pressure to restrict the ratio of hours to sales and an attempt to more nimbly adapt to changes in demand, says University of Chicago associate professor Susan Lambert. It also results in companies “overhiring,” using many part time workers instead of fewer full time workers. But Lambert says “the costs of managing this way do not enter the balance sheets of firms.” Employees who work irregularly, for example, may not always be up to speed with the latest changes to the store or the layout, she says.
“From a very engineering standpoint,...[on-call scheduling] may look efficient but when you look on front lines of firms, you see all the opportunities costs there are in terms of people walking out because they can’t find something or can’t get help.”
Another factor is technology.
“New technologies give us now the ability to predict very well variations in demand,” Lambert says.
Companies don’t need to keep workers on hold; they can figure out pretty well whether they need to have someone show up to work far in advance of two hours before the shift starts, she says. Companies are so good at predicting demand that they tried to "overoptimize" down to the minute, keeping workers on call to cover even slight changes in demand.
“You don’t need to do that micro-management,” she says. “Retailers are learning that."
So it may be, she says, that workers and firms are finding on-call scheduling is a headache for everyone.
Here are the responses from the 13 companies the New York attorney general wrote warnings to:
Ann Inc.: "Staffing guidelines do not include the practice of on-call shifts."
Gap Inc.: "Each of our brands have made a commitment to evaluate their practices and determine where we may be able to improve scheduling stability for our employees, while continuing to drive productivity in stores. As part of our commitment to more sustainable scheduling practices, we are working on a pilot project with Gap Brand and UC Hastings College of Law to examine workplace scheduling and productivity."
J.C. Penney Co: "We do not utilize on-call scheduling, and JCPenney has always maintained a policy against the practice."
Sears Holdings Corp: "Sears Holdings does not use on-call scheduling for store associates. That said, we will fully cooperate with the New York Attorney General’s office’s requests."
Target Corp: "Target does not use on-call scheduling."
TJX Cos: "We don’t use on-call shifts at TJX and it hasn’t been our practice, i.e. nothing new since April."
Williams-Sonoma Inc: "We actually discontinued [on-call scheduling] for the entire country."
Burlington Stores Inc., Crocs Inc., J. Crew Group Inc. and Urban Outfitters Inc. did not return requests for comment.
Source: Marketplace
City Council group urges JP Morgan Chase to ditch Trump council
City Council group urges JP Morgan Chase to ditch Trump council
As CEOs flee President Trump’s business advisory councils, the City Council’s Progressive Caucus is calling on JP...
As CEOs flee President Trump’s business advisory councils, the City Council’s Progressive Caucus is calling on JP Morgan Chase to do the same.
The move comes as multiple CEOs have ditched a Trump council on manufacturing business in the wake of a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., Saturday. Trump did not condemn white supremacists until Monday; on Tuesday he again insisted violence had come from “both sides.” Merck CEO Ken Frazier was first to depart, calling it a “matter of personal conscience” to stand against intolerance.
Read the full article here.
Blood in the Streets: A Conversation About Gun Violence in Chicago
Gawker - July 11, 2014, by Jason Parham - Earlier this week, writing for The Daily Beast, Roland Martin proposed a...
Gawker - July 11, 2014, by Jason Parham - Earlier this week, writing for The Daily Beast, Roland Martin proposed a solution to combat the surging violence on Chicago's South and West Sides: Send the National Guard to Chicago.
Martin's essay, narrow-minded and altogether ill-considered, was sparked by the recent killings that took place over the July 4th weekend—84 people were shot, and 14 killed. The city's poor black neighborhoods have become a recurring national talking point since President Obama, who calls Chicago home, assumed office in 2008: Violence and death, it seems, are the only constants in Chiraq. Concerned that Martin's solution for military occupation ultimately presents more harm than benefit to residents, I reached out to Ernest Wilkins, a reporter for RedEye Chicago, Josie Duffy, a writer and policy advocate at The Center for Popular Democracy, Jamilah Lemieux, senior digital editor at Ebony, and Kiese Laymon, author and contributing editor at Gawker, for answers. Our conversation appears below.
Josie Duffy: I have a lot of thoughts on this, but I'll start the conversation off by just saying one thing. If 84 people are shot and 16 are killed in one city in one weekend, I think it's clear the government has failed somewhere. So I think Martin is right insofar as the government has a responsibility to respond and attempt to rectify the problems plaguing Chicago.
But this sort of violence doesn't appear out of thin air—it's a response to a long history of systemic deprivation. That's why Martin's solution is deeply misguided, both on principle and practice. And while he suffers from a number of problems in this article – a memory deficiency, an overabundance of self-righteous moralism—perhaps the most pronounced is his laziness problem. He has a creativity deficiency.
This is his idea? More law enforcement? His suggestion is extreme, sure, but it's neither innovative nor intelligent.We're ahead of you, Roland. We've tried that. Law enforcement—from the police to the prosecutors to the prisons—have been working overtime for decades. Spoiler alert: It hasn't worked. In fact, it's made things worse in a lot of ways.
Somewhere along the way many people forgot that victims and residents of places like Chicago and St. Louis and Brownsville are perfectly capable of speaking for themselves, so I don't want to pretend to know what's best for those residents. What I do know, however, is that violence across America and especially in Chicago is perpetuated against the poor and the black and the brown. It's not a coincidence that we're talking about the same demographics that have been not only ignored, but explicitly and intentionally prevented from access to education, economic mobility, and safety. This idea of the powerful causing the problem and then swooping in to benevolently gift us the "solution" is offensive. You can't make up for systemic deprivation through law enforcement. Law enforcement doesn't have the nuance, it doesn't have the tools, and it doesn't actually work. It's reactive and not preventative. Stop trying to find a shortcut where there is no shortcut.
Do any of you think there a way, as Roland suggests, to address violence without addressing poverty? Also, has Roland heard anything about Iraq and Afghanistan lately?
Ernest Wilkins: Josie, you're so on point about the residents of Chicago being able to speak for themselves. Before we consider rolling troops down Stony Island or through the Low End, maybe we should address the lack of communication taking place between the people in these neighborhoods and the people in power in Chicago. Nothing changes without that. When I say "ignored" understand that, in a lot of cases, that's literally happening. There have been countless meetings, initiatives, caucuses, fish frys, etc. with members of the communities suffering from this violence and the people in power. You would think some insight would have been gained by now. Instead, the conversation usually goes like this:
"What is the problem here? Why is everyone killing everyone?"
"We're poor. We need money and jobs in this community."
"Ok. What's the solution to this violence though?"
"We just told you. Money and jobs in the community. A lot of this goes away with opportunities to do better in life that we currently aren't being afforded due to ignorance about our plight. Stop lumping everyone into a faceless mass of "gangbangers" and listen to us as human beings."
"Maybe you're not understanding me here. WHAT. IS. THE. SOLUTION. TO. THE. PROBLEM???"
"...We give up."
Even worse, when people from these communities define the exact issues that lead to this violence, their opinions are picked apart and not taken seriously, with the response usually being some variation of tired-ass narratives like, "You need to fix your community by pulling yourselves up by your bootstraps, not blaming the white man" or "Something something Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson" or the "solution" Roland Martin presented in that piece.
The fact is, the people who die in our streets aren't looked at as real humans. We've obsessed over the numbers and crunched the stats so much that the baseline reaction now after hearing that TRIPLE the amount of the lives lost in the Boston Marathon bombing were killed over the weekend some four miles from your house is that of numbness. You aren't sad. You aren't angry. You just post an incredulous "This has got to stop!" message to your Facebook feed, and keep it moving.
Jamilah Lemieux: Josie and Ernest, I think you've both summed up a great deal of my own frustration with the media narrative that talking heads like Roland have driven and also, the apathy that comes with being detached from the actual violence. I read this week that 85 percent of the city's violent crimes affect 5 percent of the population. That means that your average Chicagoan doesn't know anyone who has been harmed or killed, nor do they live in an area that has been affected by the violence—which is primarily concentrated in two of the cities 60 zip codes.
Fourteen homicides in a weekend is a tragedy no matter what the circumstances, but I believe that so much of the reporting on these shootings has to do with 1) the 24-hour news cycle that didn't exist when the murder rate was significantly higher in the 90s and 2) the president's connection to the city. There is something so wrong about Roland implying that the entire South and West Sides are on fire. I am tired of trying to explain the culture and the geography of my hometown to people who have never set a foot outside of O'Hare Airport because they are somehow experts on all things black and terrible. And as someone who left here—I just happen to be in town this week—12 years ago for college and never moved back and never intends to do so, I recognize my own limitations in identifying some of the shifting dynamics that have brought us from being known as "Chi-Town" to "Chiraq." However, when someone says something as reckless as 'send in the National Guard' to police American citizens who have never had the honor of being treated as such, it makes it plain that folks aren't even trying to understand what is at play here.
My parents can tell you stories of black Chicagoans being terrorized by the National Guard during the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the riots that ensued under the regime of the late and notorious Mayor Richard Daley (the first one). That any black man over the age of 40 would see this as a viable solution makes me question his knowledge of history and also, just what he thinks the National Guard does. They are trained to shoot and kill, to mobilize for war. How does that serve the people of this city? Who does that help? I do believe that government intervention—on a federal and local level—is appropriate, but coming in with guns to fight guns only increases the likelihood that innocent black people will find themselves incarcerated, maimed, or worse. What a solution looks like, I don't know, but as Ernest said, we should be looking to the people who are HERE and fighting that fight daily, as opposed to a tired police chief from Newark and the Army, to decide what that should be. People are poor, jobs are scare, the "you aren't welcome here anymore" gentrification is making it difficult for people to commute to the jobs they do have, to afford the rent and groceries that may have already been a challenge. But some cat from the South thinks that what we need are tanks and guns? That's infuriating.
Kiese Laymon: Thank y'all for breaking all of this down with plenty care, introspection and imagination. I'm not sure I have much to add other than more questions. Half of my family moved to Chicago, Indiana, and Racine a few decades ago to escape Mississippi.
I remember my Aunt Daisy—who lost a daughter to violence, and lost her son to years in prison after he was found guilty of violence—saying that there are more folks on the ground fighting to keep kids alive than anywhere else she ever lived. But those folks, Daisy claimed, are the least well-paid folks she knew.
I'm wondering what happens if we really invest in the work of folks in Chicago really fighting to ward off what white supremacy and unexplored sexist culture has produced. And if we can't allow or expect adequate compensation for those folks, should we find creative ways as black folks to fairly compensate and fairly train the folks in our community who want to do this work? What would a communal creative financial commitment to fighting the consequences of white supremacy look like?
And what role should black folk who don't live in those communities anymore play?
My other question is a tougher one. I come from a place very similar to Chicago. Jackson's murder rate is routinely higher proportionately than Chicago's. Like a lot of folks who grew up there in the 80s and 90s, I feel lucky to be alive. I know part of that is because of small classes, committed freedom fighters who let me know over and over that killing and fighting each other was playing into the hands of the worst of white folks, and a grandma I never wanted to let down. I'm not in Jackson anymore. And while I write words that I know some young folk in Jackson read, do we have the responsibility to go back to the communities we come from and commit to learning and teaching and fighting for the future of our people?
I work with young middle schoolers and high school kids in Poughkeepsie, but that's not home. Should we go home and commit to loving our people, especially when folks are talking bout unlovingly sending in men with guns to discipline them if they don't act right. Should we go home and fight?
Jason Parham: The answers we're looking for won't be easy. And while I don't agree that the National Guard is necessary to help mitigate the violence sweeping across the South Side and West Side of Chicago, I do agree that an increased level of authority—via residents who wield some sort of influence, community organizers, etc—might help subdue a portion of the terror taking place. But even then, we are not really unearthing the root of the problem.
As Ernest pointed out, there are a lot of variables at play here, the most horrific realization being: black life doesn't account for much in America. And the statistics Jamilah offered reinforce this. People who visit Chicago via a CNN news broadcast or a clip uploaded to YouTube see us, but they don't really see us. This, of course, is nothing new. But it is something that I think about often, and I wonder how a similar situation would play out in an area populated by, say, middle class whites. I accept this reality, though—a reality, I should say, that we are forcibly trying to alter, stubborn as it might be—and understand that there are cultural structures in place that allow for the continued devaluation of black and brown life (doubly if you're poor, triply if you're black, poor and a woman).
I don't have the one true solution to any of this. I'm a black man and I find value in our existence, in our love and support and uplift of each other. But I know that it begins with us. I take responsibility for my brothers and sisters. I acknowledge that what these young men are doing is wrong and hurtful, but I also understand that it comes from a place of anger and self-doubt and not wanting to be unloved. I am reminded of Kai M. Green's words: "What do we do with the scars, those of us who did not die, but still aren't free?" I don't want anybody to misinterpret what I'm saying: I am not making excuses for the violence, killing is a cowardly and terrible evil, but many of these young men are reckoning with traumas, tangible and intangible, they don't fully comprehend. A black man is born with a target on his back. That is our starting point. That some of us have made it this far is a miracle.
So to answer your question, Kiese: should we go home and fight? If we have the means to do so, absolutely. It begins with us; it begins with better and more sustainable community building. Why is it that these young men feel like joining a gang is their only option for acceptance and survival? Why is it that these kids are merely trying to "make it out" instead of trying to "live"? Obviously these issues are rooted to larger systemic problems within the context of America—the lingering residue of Jim Crow-era segregation, disinvestment in areas populated by poor black and Latino populations, inadequate schools in "urban" neighborhoods, the fracturing of the black family, etc etc—but not unsolvable. As Jamiliah noted, I don't want the readers to think we are speaking in absolutes here, this isn't the entire reality of communities at war—there are individuals doing great and important things on Chicago's South Side, and in neighborhoods like Brownsville and Compton—but the violence is a reminder that there is ever more work to be done.
Jamilah Lemieux: Do we have the responsibility to go back to the communities we come from and commit to learning and teaching and fighting for the future of our people?I struggle with this question often. On some level, I feel some guilt for leaving the place that nurtured my development and taking whatever talents or gifts I have to become part of this large New York machine. One of millions of transplants who, depending who you ask, either drain that city dry, or make it richer than its own natives could on their own. But on the flip, what does coming home look like? How do I make things better here? And do the unique challenges facing my hometown mean that I'm not entitled to the pursuit of happiness that led me to leave in the first place? Because I decided to leave long before "Chiraq" was something struggle rappers used to lend credence to careers that would have been felled by their lack of skills some 15, 20 years ago.
I'd like to believe that on some level, my work as a writer and editor who focuses on issues of race, gender. and sexuality is a contribution to my community—the black community, from Chicago, to Brooklyn and beyond. If I can figure out ways to help these South Side girls feel better about their sexual agency, or to address the flaws in the media narrative around Chicago from the place I've adopted as my home, is my absence still a betrayal?
In April, activist Leonore Draper was killed in a drive-by outside her home after leaving an anti-violence fundraiser. I honor her sacrifice, but I am not willing to give my life to Chicago. And while I understand the city well enough to know that the violence is largely contained to certain areas, and that Americans must be prepared to be shot at any time (see: Columbine, Aurora, Sandy Hook), I do feel that relocating back here comes with the increased possibility of being in the wrong place at the wrong time—especially if I were to return specifically to "help make things better." I have a child, she needs me and she needs to be safe. My ex is also from here, and when she is visiting the city without me, I just pray that the desire to go see Cousin or Auntie So-and-So in a rougher part of town takes a backseat to keeping our child away from harm. I worry over her being in shopping malls and on subway trains or anywhere that people can be found. I don't have what it takes to deal with her being down the street from where Chief Keef stays.
I try and do my best to be an ambassador for my city, to tell the Roland Martins of the world, "Look, you've got this wrong!" and to remind people that Chicago is not a city of savages, but one that has been criminally underdeveloped by structural racism and inequality. But I'm not willing to return, at least not now.
Ernest Wilkins: My family is from the Robert Taylor Homes. The environment that molded thousands of black lives—including my father's—literally doesn't exist anymore. The housing project was finally demolished in 2007. I've never been there and I never will. Still, there's still a sense of responsibility within me to do right by my people. I love Chicago. The city made me who I am. One of the main reasons I moved back home after college and living in Atlanta for a few years was to try and contribute to making the city better. As black people, I think the whole point is to recognize that situations like this affect all of us, no matter how much we might want to distance ourselves or feel like it isn't our responsibility. If you live in Brooklyn and have access to a few million, you can do more than I can on the ground here in the immediate sense. However, I can go talk to these kids and donate my time. Everyone can do something.
I think there's a sense of hopelessness and a feeling that the job is too big. The society that can save Chicago is the same one that's out here giving a man 20k to fund a goddamn potato salad on Kickstarter. We have the tools. These neighborhoods need awareness to the real issues, not rhetoric, posturing, and lack of empathy. No matter what though, the solution ain't troops, my guy.
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Big Banks Face Protests Over Treatment of Rank-and-File Employees
American Banker - April 9, 2015, by Kevin Wack - The nation's largest banks are again under attack — this time over how...
American Banker - April 9, 2015, by Kevin Wack - The nation's largest banks are again under attack — this time over how they treat their own rank-and-file employees.
A coalition called the Committee for Better Banks, which includes unions and community groups, is planning protests Monday outside big-bank offices in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn. The organizers are marrying long-standing complaints about the impact of bank practices in low-income neighborhoods and the large salaries of top executives with newer gripes about the banks' treatment of their own tellers and sales representatives. The central message is that the country's biggest banks should be paying higher wages, offering better benefits, and eliminating aggressive sales goals that can create stress for lower-pay employees. "While the financial industry has recovered in a big way since the crash — it's really come back strong — frontline workers have not experienced that," said Aditi Sen, a research analyst at the Center for Popular Democracy, an advocacy organization that released a report Thursday in connection with the upcoming protests.
In May 2014, the annual mean wage for tellers at depository institutions was $26,720, or $12.84 per hour, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
It's not clear whether the upcoming protests will include a substantial number of bank employees. Erin Mahoney, a spokeswoman for the coalition, said in an email that "thousands of bank workers have been engaging with us" using petitions and other methods.
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A guaranteed “Jobs For All” Program is Gaining Traction Among 2020 Democratic Hopefuls
A guaranteed “Jobs For All” Program is Gaining Traction Among 2020 Democratic Hopefuls
A longtime organizer, Barkan — who has Lou Gehrig’s disease — gained national recognition after his viral confrontation...
A longtime organizer, Barkan — who has Lou Gehrig’s disease — gained national recognition after his viral confrontation of Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., over his support for the Republican tax plan and the cuts to Medicare that it would impose. When he was diagnosed with ALS in late 2016, Barkan was working with the Center for Popular Democracy on a campaign to reform the Federal Reserve and American monetary policymaking with it. Following Trump’s election, he has continued to fight for that and against a range of Republican policies.
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