Hundreds of people showed up to thank Ford for testifying
Hundreds of people showed up to thank Ford for testifying
Tracey Corder, an organizer with the progressive Center for Popular Democracy, said she has been meeting with...
Tracey Corder, an organizer with the progressive Center for Popular Democracy, said she has been meeting with Republican members of Congress in recent days and urging them to take Ford’s allegations seriously.“Survivors are being retraumatized by all of this, and we’ve been telling [senators] that we need a Supreme Court justice who is a fair and decent person,” said Corder, who flew in from Oakland, California, to join the demonstrations. “If this were an episode of Scandal, [Kavanaugh] would have withdrawn by now,” she continued. “That’s our current politics —it’s even more absurd than television.”
Read the full article here.
Activists: US Justice Department Response to Baltimore Police Racism Falls Short
Activists: US Justice Department Response to Baltimore Police Racism Falls Short
The response by the US Department of Justice to exposing Baltimore Police Department (BPD) violations of citizens’...
The response by the US Department of Justice to exposing Baltimore Police Department (BPD) violations of citizens’ constitutional rights falls short of addressing the systemic problem of racism in US policing, activists said.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — "[The Department of Justice] is being forced to look like it is responsive, so to speak, but it also can’t deal with the systemic nature of things," Pan-African Community Action activist Netfa Freeman told Sputnik.
On Wednesday, the Justice Department released a report concluding that the BPD systematically engaged in conduct that violates the US Constitution, and disproportionately targets African-Americans. In response, the Justice Department entered into a consent agreement with the BPD to reform the latter.
"We know it is not just Baltimore and it’s not just ‘bad apples’," Freeman said. The report is still "treating things like they are isolated incidents, not like it is a systemic problem or an epidemic," he said of anti-black police misconduct.
In a forum hosted by the Institute for Policy Studies, policy advocate at the Center for Popular Democracy, Marbre Stahly-Butts, said that while it was "important" for the federal government to articulate the problem of police abuses, Justice Department's actions did not go far enough.
An anti-terrorism rehearsal is held targeting a possible bomb attack during the Olympic Games at the main bus station in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on May 12, 2016
Stahly-Butts argued the Justice Department should leverage the findings of the report to cut off funding to local law enforcement caught violating federal law.
"If we find… that you are violating the basic human rights of people in this city, we, as the government, will not give you taxpayer money to do that," Stahly-Butts said.
The Justice Department report covered police misconduct that took place from January 2010 through May 2015. The investigation was launched in 2015 following the widely publicized death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old African-American who died from wounds he sustained while in BPD custody.
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Toys 'R' Us employees demand severance pay for 33,000 workers
Toys 'R' Us employees demand severance pay for 33,000 workers
The push comes as a part of a campaign supported by the advocacy group Center for Popular Democracy. The campaign will...
The push comes as a part of a campaign supported by the advocacy group Center for Popular Democracy. The campaign will host a series of events at Toys "R" Us headquarters and the offices of private-equity owners. More than 50,000 people have already signed a petition calling for Toys "R" Us workers to receive severance pay.
Economic Recovery? Not for Ferguson or Black America
MSNBC - March 13, 2015, by Jane Timm - “America is coming back,” President Obama declared late last month, touting...
MSNBC - March 13, 2015, by Jane Timm - “America is coming back,” President Obama declared late last month, touting strong job creation and rising wages. “We’ve risen from recession.” But for Ferguson, Missouri – and black America as a whole – the recovery still hasn’t come.
“Black unemployment rates are still at the height of the national unemployment rates during the Great Recession,” the Center for Popular Democracy’s Connie Razza told msnbc. “We’re still in a recession in black America.”
Indeed, while American unemployment is down to 5.5%, black unemployment is at 10.4%. While wages have risen over the last 15 years by 45 and 48 cents for Latino and white workers, respectively, they’ve fallen 44 cents for black workers, according to a study produced by Razza at the left-leaning organization. The net wealth of African-American families, too, is hurting. “As the wealth of the other groups is stabilizing in the wake of the recession, the wealth of the African-American community is declining,” Razza added.
Blacks have long faced unemployment rates that are double those of white workers – according to Pew, it’s been that way since 1954 – but sources say the recession has hurt black America, and the St. Louis region, particularly hard. “It’s not just a recession of jobs, it’s a recession of income; it’s a recession of wealth in the sense that a whole lot of homes in Ferguson are still under water. It’s a three-way disaster for people in that part of St. Louis county,” Dave Robertson, a political science professor at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, told msnbc. “In places like Ferguson, it’s not coming back quickly.
The most recent racial employment breakdown indicates that Missouri’s problems may be worse than the rest of the country’s, too. In Missouri, black unemployment was 15.7% in the fall of 2014 – triple the state’s 4.5% white unemployment at the time.
“It’s not just unemployment,” Robertson added. “It’s the poor wages, it’s the under-employment, it’s the part-time work.”
And economic inequality is fueling the protests and activist movement, sources said. “There’s a real sense of despair especially for those young folks. You just don’t have the economic opportunities for young people. Especially young people coming out of sub-standard school districts … not having the tools prepared for the economy,” Ferguson activist Umar Lee told msnbc. “And then there’s a shortage of jobs, leaving young people at a disadvantage, and so they just drop out.”
“That’s the driving force, we believe,” former state Sen. Maida Coleman told msnbc. She’s heading up Gov. Jay Nixon’s Office of Community Engagement, a state office formed in the wake of August’s protests to focus on low-income and minority communities. “What’s happening now is that we see a real need to address these high levels of unemployment, just as we are addressing education,” Coleman said. “The hopelessness needs to be addressed.”
But the problem extends beyond Ferguson; when there are jobs to be had, black Americans struggle to get hired.
A 2013 study found that black college grads had twice the unemployment rate of white college grads and that racial inequality actually grew during the recovery. A 2014 study by nonpartisan education and economic advocacy group the Young Invincibles found that black workers need college credit to compete with white high school drop-outs thanks to racial discrimination.
Getting an interview may be half the battle, too. A 2003 study found that very white-sounding names received 50% more callbacks for interviews than a very black-sounding name.
For these reasons, Razza and the Center for Popular Democracy are urging the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates low. The Fed had vowed to keep rates low until employment dipped below 6.5% and the recovery came in earnest, but Razza argued that the country needs to be closer to “full employment”—that is there are close to the same number of jobs as people who want to work—before the Fed can really stop intervening. “The fact that black Americas are still experiencing a recession is really … the canary in the coal mine of the recovery,” she said.
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Meet the lefty club behind a blitz of new laws in cities around the country
Like many new organizations, Local Progress sprang from the...
Like many new organizations, Local Progress sprang from the ashes of a crisis.
In 2012, New York City Councilmember Brad Lander, who represents Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood, and Nick Licata, then Seattle council chair, had a phone call about how to deal with the tidal wave of foreclosed homes that had swept the country. A few loosely organized collectives had emerged around the challenge of blight, with some cities trying innovative and legally risky strategies like using the power of eminent domain to seize the foreclosed mortgages. But there wasn’t a place to convene like-minded local officials around that issue — or any other. “It really grew into 'hey, there should be something like this,'” Lander says.
Rather than creating a new organization, Lander reached out to the Center for Popular Democracy, another young outfit that secured grants to support a few staff members for the project. They first gathered in 2012, at the left-leaning Center for American Progress in Washington. The group has grown — with annual convenings and ones that are more ad hoc, like a forum in support of Seattle’s first-in-the-nation vote to raise its minimum wage to $15 in 2014. The show of solidarity helped. “One thing they said was, 'make it look like we’re not crazy,’” Lander says, of Seattle’s council.
Many cities have a klatch of liberal legislators who push for higher minimum wages, paid leave mandates, taxes on plastic bags and the like. By putting them in contact with one another and other community groups, Local Progress has in recent years created a policy feedback loop that’s accelerated the spread of new laws in municipalities across the country. In the absence of federal action on many issues, it’s trying to make local government into something that doesn’t just pick up the trash — but solves some of society’s biggest problems as well.
City-level cooperation, of course, isn’t a new idea.
Its first iteration came about a century ago, during the Progressive era, when urban leaders fought for home rule for cities in order to establish construction codes, health and safety standards, and the architecture of good government through state-based alliances called Municipal Leagues. Later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal created programs that bypassed the more conservative governors and state legislatures, filtering aid for infrastructure projects through local Democratic machines.
That relationship started to weaken through the 1970s and ‘80s, when some Democrats migrated to the suburbs, urban politics became more racialized, and the flow of money slowed to a trickle.
“What’s new in the last 30 years is that federal role has been eroding, and by now it’s really difficult to get anything done,” says Margaret Weir, a professor at UC Berkeley who specializes in urban politics. "The Reagan administration signaled to cities that 'you’re pretty much on your own.’"
Meanwhile, the old Municipal Leagues had evolved into bodies like the National League of Cities and the National Council of State Legislators, which serve as convening entities — but don’t tend to push the policy envelope that much, so as to remain all-inclusive. Licata, in particular, was frustrated that there seemed to be more focus on issues of greater concern to small towns, rather than those of large cities; he also wanted to see more emphasis on issues of social justice and racial equity than the existing organizations were willing to take on.
"The old ones got defined in more nonpartisan terms,” says Theda Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology at Harvard. “Today’s progressives want a harder edge."
Creating an organization of self-described progressive elected leaders serves another purpose: It creates an easy and fast way for liberal activists to access the people most likely to take action.
"There wasn’t a place where you could find progressive elected officials in the aggregate. You’d find one here and you’d find one there,” says Angela Glover Blackwell, president of Policylink, which focuses on equity for communities of color. Local Progress “was a gold mine.”
So far, Local Progress has appealed to reform-oriented elected officials like D.C. City Councilmember Elissa Silverman, whom the organization recruited last year. In October, she made a quick trip to Los Angeles for the group’s first large convening, where she found about 100 people like her trying to think creatively about what local officials can do within the law — like require predictable schedules for retail employees, for example, or crack down on non-payment of freelancers.
"I was not totally sold on the value of going out there, but I said ‘what the hell,’ and I’m really glad I did,” Silverman says. Now, when she wants to workshop a new policy idea or learn what others had experienced with proposals that crop up in D.C. — like funding a new arena that will be used by a professional sports team, which Silverman opposes — she can tap into the network with one email to a listserv, or look up a policy toolkit that Local Progress’ small staff has put together on the issue.
A few months later, while introducing a proposal for public financing of municipal elections, she mentioned the experiences of three young council members she met at the conference: Antonio Reynoso, Ritchie Torres, and Carlos Menchaca of New York, all of whom had triumphed in unlikely campaigns against powerful opponents.
"Antonio in particular said 'Hey Elissa, if it wasn’t for public financing, I wouldn’t have been able to win,’ and that was very important for me to hear,” Silverman recalls. ”I was already convinced, but to have all three of them say that made a big impact.”
In trying to push a progressive agenda in cities, Local Progress hasn’t escaped opposition.
Some of the most formidable comes from the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative membership organization that helps Republican state senators and representatives pass laws confining the size of government,often to tremendous effect. In 2014, liberals formed the State Innovation Exchange to try to serve as a counterweight, but its influence is so far fairly limited.
ALEC doesn’t have to fight Local Progress’ members directly. Instead, the group has favored “pre-emption” laws that enforce uniform rules across a state -- preventing a city on its own from passing stricter gun laws, or higher minimum wages. Pittsburgh’s new paid sick days ordinance, for example, was just thrown out by a court on the grounds that the city didn’t have the authority under state law to enact it.
“As cities step out and move the ball forward, states have come in to take away their power to do just that,” says Andrew Friedman, co-director of the Center for Popular Democracy, where Local Progress is housed.
About a year after Local Progress had its first meeting, ALEC formed the American City and Council Exchange, also focused on local jurisdictions. The group’s director, Jon Russell, met with LocalProgress co-founder Nick Licata, who had joined as a member to learn more about the group. Russell thinks they could find common ground on some issues, like openness and transparency in local government. But that doesn’t usually include the question of what cities should control, and what should be left to the state.
“There’s some situations where the state does a better job, and wants to have consistency,” Russell says. “What we tend to tell our members is to focus on what we do best — making sure our budgets are effective and efficient. Don’t get tied up in these political issues that more recently have crept into local government.” He thinks that local officials shouldn’t listen to environmental groups, for example, trying to ban fracking or keep coal trains from coming through town.
“If they want to work on state issues, they should run for state government,” Russell said, of the policy entrepreneurs. "People want their trash picked up. They want their police to respond to calls. They want their fires put out.”
The central idea of Local Progress, however, is that no issue is out of bounds for city government. Besides environmental groups, it has heavy involvement from the labor movement; an AFL-CIO vice president sits on the organization’s board, and the conference in October had a session on the Service Employees International Union’s Fight for $15 minimum wage campaign, along with numerous appearances by union officials. Those outside groups are essential to getting new policy ideas into practice.
In time, Lander sees the direction of policy innovation starting to flow in reverse: From pioneering cities up to state and federal lawmakers, who might take cues from what appears to be a groundswell of support. He recently wonthe passage of a bill banning credit checks for employment, for example.
“Eventually that should be a national law or a CFPB regulation. That’s not going to happen until a lot of cities and states do it,” Lander says. “And if there’s a competition for who can do the strongest law, eventually it’ll make sense for businesses to say 'we should have a national law.'"
But right now not all cities are able to adopt the kinds of path-breaking new laws that councils can pull off in liberal enclaves on either coast. Take something like allowing Uber drivers to unionize, which could entail years of litigation while courts decide whether it’s kosher — as the mayor of Seattlepointed out in a letter to council members after they voted unanimously in favor of it. Being the first takes both political will and financial resources to enforce new mandates and weather the inevitable legal hiccups or unforeseen consequences that might require adjustments down the road.
That’s also where the leaders of Local Progress think a central clearinghouse of information could come in handy: It might help a city councilperson in Terre Haute, Ind., or Tempe, Ariz., avoid having to design an inclusionary zoning ordinance from scratch. Moreover, it makes members feel connected to a larger movement, rather than just slogging away in the trenches.
“It’s a question of looking at a progressive issue, and understanding that progressive issues do reflect the interests of everyone,” Licata says. “As an additive to the gas, we’re able to get more mileage and oomph on this issues.”
Source: Washington Post
Hundreds of New Yorkers gather at MOMA PS1 to raise money for Puerto Rico
Hundreds of New Yorkers gather at MOMA PS1 to raise money for Puerto Rico
The movement to help hurricane ravaged Puerto Rico continues. Hundreds of New Yorkers attended a fundraiser at MOMA PS1...
The movement to help hurricane ravaged Puerto Rico continues. Hundreds of New Yorkers attended a fundraiser at MOMA PS1 in Long Island City Wednesday night.
According to organizers, all the money raised for the Hurricane Maria Community Relief and Recovery Fund will go towards relief work and supplies on the island.
Watch the video and read the article here.
Bill to offer state citizenship for undocumented immigrants
NY Daily News - June 16, 2014, by Erin Durkin - Undocumented immigrants in New York could become “state citizens” with...
NY Daily News - June 16, 2014, by Erin Durkin - Undocumented immigrants in New York could become “state citizens” with a slew of benefits from driver’s licenses under a new bill to be introduced Monday.
Advocates are set to announce a bill that would allow immigrants who aren’t U.S. citizens to become New York state citizens if they can prove they’ve lived and paid taxes in the state for three years and pledge to uphold New York laws, regardless of whether they’re in the country legally.
“The path to achieving opportunity and equity and dignity for immigrants through Washington seems blocked by Washington’s general dysfunction,” said Andrew Friedman, executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy and a founder of Make the Road New York. “States should push for full equality and inclusion.”
The bill will face long odds in Albany, where even more modest immigration reforms have failed to get through the legislature.
The bill would apply to about 2.7 million New Yorkers who lack citizenship, including those in the country legally and illegally.
People who secured state citizenship under the bill would be able to vote in state and local elections, and run for state office.
They could get a driver’s license, a professional license issued by the state, and Medicaid and other benefits controlled by the state.
Immigrants would also be eligible for in-state tuition and financial aid, and would be protected from discrimination based on their status. And the bill would sharply limit state authorities’ cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.
The legislation would not grant legal authorization to work or change any other regulations governed by federal law.
It’s destined to be a longshot in Albany, where the DREAM Act, which would help undocumented students afford college, and efforts to offer driver’s licenses have failed so far.
But backers say it will prompt similar efforts in other states, similar to how states led the way on gay marriage, with talks on bills already underway in Illinois, Oregon, and Maryland.
“Obviously this is not something that’s going to pass immediately, but nothing as broad as this or as bold as this passes immediately,” said Sen. Gustavo Rivera (D-Bronx), the sponsor in the Senate.
The bill is estimated to cost taxpayers $106 to 173 million a year, while generating $145 million in new economic activity and saving drivers $100 million in insurance premiums, advocates say.
SourceActivists to SEC’s White: Step aside on audit regulator appointment
A national coalition of 14 organizations told Mary Jo White, chairwoman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, to...
A national coalition of 14 organizations told Mary Jo White, chairwoman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, to take herself out of the selection process for the next chair of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, the audit regulator.
In a letter sent on Thursday the signers said they believe there’s a conflict of interest created by her decision on an issue that will impact her family’s income. That’s because John White, her husband, is a member of the PCAOB’s Standing Advisory Group, selected by the board of the PCAOB, who are in turn chosen by the SEC and White.
The conflict has existed ever since White was approved as SEC chairwoman. Her spokeswoman told MarketWatch in September that her husband’s role in the PCAOB group was reviewed when she first took the job, and then again when the first PCAOB board appointment during her tenure was required. The conflict rose to the surface in early September, when Bloomberg reported that White was considering potential candidates to replace PCAOB Chair James Doty.
Doty has signaled he would like to return for another term but his industry reform-minded tenure has caused some, including at the SEC, to criticize his tenure. Critics say progress on the “nuts and bolts” of the agency is slow because of Doty’s preoccupation with larger industry-level initiatives focused on greater accountability and transparency for auditors and audits.
Bloomberg’s coverage of the conflict, and White’s admission that she was shopping for alternatives to Doty, led John White’s law firm, Cravath, Swaine & Moore, to remove marketing-type references to White’s position on the SAG from its website the following day, as reported by MarketWatch.
The organizations are the Alliance for a Just Society, American Family Voices, Campaign for America’s Future, Center for Effective Government, Center for Popular Democracy, Community Organizations in Action, Communications Workers of America, Democracy for America, Main Street Alliance, The Other 98%, Public Citizen, RootsAction, Rootstrikers and MoveOn.org Civil Action.
Source: MarketWatch
Republicans beat the resistance on health care once. Here comes the rematch.
Republicans beat the resistance on health care once. Here comes the rematch.
REAGAN NATIONAL AIRPORT, Virginia — The anti-Trump “resistance” movement is about to get its biggest test in months —...
REAGAN NATIONAL AIRPORT, Virginia — The anti-Trump “resistance” movement is about to get its biggest test in months — and the stakes could hardly be higher.
On Thursday, Senate Republicans released the Better Care Reconciliation Act, which would dramatically reduce subsidies for lower-income Americans while cutting Medicaid and rolling back its expansion under Obamacare. The CBO hasn’t released an estimate of coverage impacts, but the House version of the bill would have resulted in 23 million fewer people getting covered.
Read the full article here.
How Much Do U.S. Cities Spend Every Year On Policing?
How Much Do U.S. Cities Spend Every Year On Policing?
Over the past three decades, U.S. cities have allocated larger and larger shares of their budgets towards law...
Over the past three decades, U.S. cities have allocated larger and larger shares of their budgets towards law enforcement. Today, the U.S. collectively spends $100 billion a year on policing and a further $80 billion on incarceration. Even though crime levels have dropped substantially over the last 30 years in line with the spending uptake, a report released last month argues that this occurred in spite of higher police budgets. Compiled by The Center for Popular Democracy, Law for Black Lives and the Black Youth Project 100, the report makes the case that investment in mental health, housing, youth development and living wages would stabilize communities and prove more effective than policing.
Read the full article here.
4 days ago
4 days ago