New Orleans  

There is too much déjà vu in this campaign.

Once again, just like in the Clinton first term, we have a Democratic President that has not raised the federal minimum wage. Despite Jen’s skills and other voices rising, there won’t be an increase in the federal minimum wage this year on the eve of an election.  There may be 1.8 million workers as Steven Greenhouse points out who are stuck at the minimum wage with another 2.5 million trapped beneath $7.25, but if this part of the vote is registered and not too suppressed, these are people voting more with their feet than with ballots and if they make it there, most will vote for Obama anyway, so little sweat will be expended in this direction.  Once again our only real hope will be that if Obama is re-elected, then perhaps there will be a bump before the end of the 2^nd term following the Clinton pattern.

Looking at the 18 states with minimums over the federal level, it is surprising to me how narrow the compression is between what states have done and what Congress has allowed.  I need to do more research on this in coming days.  In some cases I fear that I have not kept up and the erosion of power at the state level by organizations and the surge by the right and groups like ALEC, may have erased some of the victories around citizen wealth won in recent years.  Florida in 2004 for example voted for an increase $1 over the federal minimum with an index.  Now, the index to inflation seems to have survived, but the dollar seems to have disappeared with Florida at $7.67 only a bit more than $0.40 over the federal level.  It also appears that we may have erred in withdrawing ballot initiatives in states like Arkansas and Michigan and accepting legislative increases, which now have allowed those states to simply pay the same rate as the federal level.

The Working Families Party is right.  The changes have to come at the state level if there is going to be real progress, but we finally have to make permanent indexing to inflation part of the package, or we need to step aside and let others carry the weight.

We won a statewide initiative in Missouri to increase the minimum wage after losing an earlier effort.  Now reportedly yet another coalition is amassing signatures to once again try to raise the wage now stuck at the federal $7.25 level.  We can’t keep doing this over and over again and now managing to make change permanent.

We need to look to make these changes at the state level, but we need to add indexing and we need to embed language that would require any rollback in the minimum wage to go to the voters, rather than allowing counter revolutions to wipe away these gains for working families.

Time to learn some lessons!

New Orleans

Unions know the wage and benefit train has already left the station in Wisconsin and seem to concede it.  The Times today reports as much:

“The flip has emboldened Mr. Walker, the new Republican governor who has proposed the cuts to benefits and bargaining rights, arguing that he desperately needs to bridge a deficit expected to reach $3.6 billion for the coming two-year budget.

Union leaders have said they would accept the financial terms of Mr. Walker’s proposal. The more controversial provisions, though, would strip public employees of collective-bargaining rights. (emphasis added)

In Whitewater, Ben Penwell, a lawyer whose wife is a public employee, said he saw no reason to strip away workers’ bargaining rights if they had agreed to benefit cuts.

“They’re willing to do what’s necessary fiscally without giving up rights in the future,” he said.

And Pat Wellnitz, working in his accounting office on Sunday, wondered why such bargaining provisions were needed if the real problem was simply saving money.

“That’s pretty drastic even for a staunch Republican,” he said.”

The only hope in Wisconsin seems to be that the very hard, bluntness of the power play by Governor Scott Walker is so extreme in its attack on unions that it fails in Times’ columnist David Brooks’ words the “fairness” test or the old Clinton test of “sharing the pain” by favoring small businesses and more Republican unions of police and fire, while slamming teachers and other public workers.  Furthermore as indicated above Wisconsin is not a “hater-state” of what I would call the New South yet (Arizona being the most spectacular example of this new taxonomy), so some of the citizens get the fact that this is tactical extremism.

Other states will not be so lucky.  Places like Ohio already saw 8000 plus home health care workers that were state reimbursed loss collective bargaining rights by the swipe of a Governor’s pen.  There are similar concerns in Michigan for 30 to 40,000 publicly subsidized workers there.  Reading about the spitball fights that the Republican governor of New Jersey has waged with teachers and others there, it’s clear that the strategy is clearly to “defund” the progressive movement and launch attacks on as many battlefields as possible against unions and others that might be part of such forces.  I’m worried about other Republican presidential-wannabes and what they might feel they have to do in order to stay in the game.  Will we see Louisiana’s Bobbie Jindal or Florida’s Rick Scott try to dismantle what exists of collective bargaining in these states?

Collective bargaining, independent of economics, used to be seen as a foundationally appropriate aspiration for working people connected to the freedoms of speech and assembly embedded in America’s most honored and cherished traditions.  We cannot allow a situation where the argument simply devolves to unions were “once a good thing” or that we allow unions to exist in principle but not in reality.

Wisconsin and the other states following its lead raise the specter that we are now moving past the tipping point for unions and much to quickly to the vanishing point, unless we change what we are saying and doing pretty damn quickly.

 Toronto           

            Which brings me to banks and money transfer organizations at the heart of ACORN International’s Remittance Justice Camapign, where it turns out that almost know one is on any base at all.  It seems no wonder that the charges banks and MTOs have larded onto immigrant families efforts to send money to relatives in the home country are so predatory, because from our early research it appears that there is virtually no effort to regulate the movement of these payments at all.  Of course there are some new post 9-11 efforts to hand slap some transactions to slow down terrorism, but nothing that would pay more than lip service to the predatory charges, fees, and exchange rates tacked on to remittances (see our report and sign the petition of support at www.remittancejustice.org). 

            National central banks are nominally in charge of regulating the kind of banks that Dimon thinks are being bashed, but have been silent or stumbling at best in even looking at the problems of consumers and costs.  The United States Federal Reserve Bank has proven this time and time in so many areas of banking endeavor that this should come as no surprise.  The Atlanta region is piloting an international automatic clearing house function so that businesses can move money more easily to Europe, but nothing for consumers.  In Canada and the United States there is a patchwork quilt of confusion, where money transfer organizations like Western Union, MoneyGram and the scores of other outfits that have sprung up are nominally under the authority of individual states or provinces, many of which do little other than collect operating fees, but certainly don’t pretend to regulate these outfits and their cost structure.  In some cases they worry that they may share authority for regulations, so the quandary is even more pronounced.  The situation is more than a mess, it’s a pathetic tragedy costing immigrant working families billions that simply end up in the pockets of the much maligned financial industry.

            The response to our inquires from BMO, the Bank of Montreal, has been indicative.  After first pretending that they had already met our demands for charges not to exceed 5% by deftly arguing that if someone remitted thousands of dollars the costs would be lowered, despite the fact that most remittances are in the $100 level, they then tried to claim that they were working on costs.  When we asked to meet and hear the progress, they then claimed it was “proprietary,” which might be a euphemism for “predatory” or could simply a fancy word for “buzz off.”

            We seem to have little choice but to open up another front to move for regulations wherever we can get a hearing, while continuing to press the MTOs and bankers to do the right thing, which as Chase’s Dimon seems to indicate has about the same chance as a snowball in hell of moving bankers and their buddies.

Quepos           

            Partially, it was simply the “one that got away.”  It’s footprint was smaller with a base in Santa Barbara that was too far away from our groups and members to do much damage.  They had gotten into this predatory business and done very well, but were impervious to the impacts.  What did it matter to their normal customer base  in Santa Barbara after all?

            Direct discussions with Jackson & Hewitt, when I was with ACORN, when round-and-round, with J&H always claiming they would not “unilaterally disarm,” but would do so as H&R Block did so and others like Liberty Tax Services.  H&R Block was going to move from HSBC to its own bank.  I’m not sure if that happened or not.  Liberty was also a big customer for Santa Barbara. 

            The actions of OCC and other banking regulators are key here, because the withdrawal of Santa Barbara from this line of lending could finally push RALs out of the market, which would be huge.

            This was the Christmas present report from Bloomberg News:

Regulators ordered Santa Barbara Bank & Trust to stop providing the loan money, which covered about 75 percent of Jackson Hewitt’s financial products program, according to a regulatory filing by Jackson Hewitt.

Shares of the company, the No. 2 tax preparer behind H&R Block, dropped $1.34 to $4.50 on Thursday.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency told Santa Barbara Bank & Trust on Dec. 18 that the lender would not receive regulatory approval to originate the refund anticipation loans in 2010, according to a statement from the bank’s parent, the Pacific Capital Bancorp.

A bank spokesman, Tony Rossi, said that “the tax refund loan business is a sort of niche business that falls outside of what would be considered core banking operations.”

The bank signed a nonbinding letter of intent with a private equity firm to sell the tax business, the statement said.

Tax preparers are locked in a battle for customers, with Jackson Hewitt vowing this month to regain market share from H&R Block. Firms can attract clients with refund anticipation loans, in which customers who need cash immediately can get a short-term loan, typically lasting a few weeks, that is based on the expected amount of their tax refund.

Jackson Hewitt, with 6,600 outlets and almost three million clients, has been losing customers to H&R Block and Intuit, which makes TurboTax software. It suspended its dividend in March and has hired Goldman Sachs to explore “strategic alternatives,” language that typically means a company may be sold.

            The next target for economic justice reformers and citizen wealth advocates will need to be the unknown “private equity” company that will be tarnishing its reputation and brand – if such a concept is possible in private equity – by buying the Santa Barbara RALs business.  The other target may end up being whomever buys Jackson & Hewitt if Goldman Sachs is able to do the offload.

            You sow what you reap.