Category: News

US Workers Need Financial Relief Now

Posted on by

By Lea Ceasrine & Rose Aquilar
KALW

LINK TO AUDIO

On this edition of Your Call, we’re discussing the dire need for economic relief as millions of US workers are being laid off or losing their jobs.

According to SurveyUSA, a staggering 14 million people have been laid off so far. Economists say upcoming job losses will be unprecedented. As we head towards April 1, when bills are due, relief is still nowhere in sight. Why is it taking so long? We’ll get an update on the federal stimulus bill and find out about relief at the state and local levels.

Guests: 

Adam Briones, director of economic equity at The Greenlining Institute

Steven Greenhouse, former New York Times labor reporter and author of Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor

The FCC Wants to Shut Out the Public – Again

Posted on by

by Paul Goodman
The Progressive

President Donald Trump is not a big fan of open government. He likes to implement policies without having to deal with annoying inconveniences, like input from the public.

For example, if you were chair of the Federal Communications Commission, and you wanted to spend your time handing out favors to huge phone and internet providers like AT&T, T-Mobile and Comcast, having to consider public input would be quite a nuisance. That’s what is happening right now, on an issue that affects nearly everyone.

The current FCC chair, Ajit Pai, is a former Verizon lobbyist who has repeatedly disregarded the public interest in enacting rules that hike corporate profits at the expense of low-income consumers and consumers of color. He’s still doing that on net neutrality.

In 2015, the FCC implemented net neutrality rules that prohibited providers from blocking online content or creating “fast lanes” and “slow lanes” on the internet — rules that were supported by 83% of voters, including 75% of Republicans. But phone and internet providers hated those rules, and one of the first actions Pai took after his becoming FCC chair in 2017 was to eliminate them.

Pai pointedly ignored comments from the public unless they contained “serious legal arguments.” He refused to consider more than 50,000 consumer complaints about net neutrality violations, and disregarded that more than a million anti-net-neutrality comments were fraudulent. In the end, an industry-sponsored study found that 98.5% of the unique public comments filed at the FCC supported net neutrality rules — but Pai eliminated them anyway.

Now he’s at it again.

A court recently held that Pai’s legal reasoning for getting rid of net neutrality meant that the FCC could not regulate internet-based 911 services, provide subsidies for internet service for low-income households, or control how internet providers installed their wires and cables on telephone poles. The court kicked the proceeding back to the FCC to address these regulations, which requires another opportunity for the public to comment.

Pai has set the shortest possible comment deadline of March 30, 2020 — once again demonstrating that he’s not interested in public input.

One of the cornerstones of our democracy, enshrined in the First Amendment, is the right to petition the government for redress — that is, to make our opinions known to policymakers. This principle permeates every level of policy-making in this country, from the right to public trials, to open meeting laws, to the right to access public records.

Chairman Pai is thumbing his nose at the principle and thinks he can disregard public input. Let’s prove him wrong — go to www.fcc.gov/ecfs/filings/express and let the FCC know that the public will be heard.

In ‘Alice Street,’ Oakland Artist-Activists Build Power By Bridging Communities

Posted on by

By Sam Lefebvre
KQED

Throughout last year, the steel and concrete frame of a new building in downtown Oakland grew to obscure a sprawling mural. Protesters with picket signs disappeared from view, along with dancers, drummers and martial arts practitioners, leaving the faces of centerpieces Malonga Casquelourd and Ruth Beckford, pillars of the city’s black performing arts tradition. To passersby today the entire artwork is imperceptible behind an incoming housing development.

Alice Street, a forthcoming documentary by Spencer Wilkinson, shows how the Universal Language mural’s creation and erasure alike catalyzed a multiracial anti-gentrification coalition with significant, ongoing effects on real estate development and city planning in downtown Oakland. Set in just a few city blocks, it’s a story about intractable loss as well as collective refusal, depicting artists’ role in grassroots activism that builds power by bridging communities.

Wilkinson, 44, an Oakland filmmaker whose first feature, One Voice (2018), focused on the Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir, did not anticipate filming for five years when he started chronicling the mural’s design as part of a work-trade deal in 2014. Now he’s submitting the 70-minute Alice Street documentary to film festivals and arranging screenings in other cities grappling with gentrification. Wilkinson expects to announce more Bay Area screenings in the coming months.

Alice Street begins with Destiny Muhammad reciting a poem at the corner of 14th and Alice streets in downtown Oakland to subtle, vaguely religious music by Micah Berek. “An intersection of traditions, ancient rhythms, culture keepers and urban oracles,” she says. A montage shows the neighborhood’s cultural diversity and changing built environment. The credits roll, framed by cranes. Imposed on aerial footage of the low-slung flatlands are sharply rising housing costs.

The film shortly settles on aerosol artist Desi Mundo and studio painter Pancho Pescador of the Community Rejuvenation Project embarking on their largest mural yet: Four walls around a parking lot at Alice and 14th streets. For inspiration, they look directly across the street to the Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts, a historic city-owned hub of Afro-diasporic drumming and dance, and also to the Chinatown senior apartments and community center Hotel Oakland.

The story has no single conflict or antagonist. The challenge at first appears to be the muralists’ desire to represent two communities to which they’re admitted outsiders, and the project’s most outspoken opponent is an elderly white woman who objects to its exclusion of white people. As soon as the mural is designed and painted to the satisfaction of most neighborhood stakeholders, though, a housing development proposal threatens to render it totally invisible.

“People in the Bay Area are starting to see the benefits of Oakland,” says Maria Poncel of Bay Development, explaining to Mundo and Pescador that the mural will continue to exist behind the planned 16-story tower. “We’re going through sort of a second renaissance.” It’s one of several awkward remarks from developers, property owners and elected officials (has Mayor Libby Schaaf retired “secret sauce”?) that Wilkinson seems to highlight for their evident shallowness.

Halfway through the documentary, then, the mural intended to celebrate cultures at risk of displacement itself confronts disappearance, multiplying its symbolic potency. And the Malonga-Hotel Oakland bloc strengthened through the mural’s development acquires political power that Wilkinson—using interviews and historical flashbacks about racist city planning practices and housing discrimination in Oakland—casts in a longer lineage of racial solidarity.

The goal of the new coalition isn’t immediately evident in the documentary. Theo Williams, leader of Malonga tenant SambaFunk, says at a meeting that he doesn’t necessarily oppose the development, yet no one in the film persuasively argues on its behalf. Complicating the narrative are new problems: Noise complaints resurface concerns about intolerant new neighbors to the Malonga, and the activists crash a city planning process, demanding meaningful representation.

Unsurprisingly for grassroots activism, it’s a dizzying cycle of setback and success. A subplot about Jerry Brown’s early 2000s attempt as Oakland mayor to shutter what was then the Alice Arts Center is a welcome rejoinder to recent hagiography, but it creates some narrative whiplash. Still, the story regains focus when the coalition formally appeals the building’s planning commission approval in order to negotiate a community benefits agreement with the developer.

The coalition secured funds for the Malonga and for a replacement mural (now being designed for the wall of the Greenlining Institute nearby). It also modeled a strategy since used by the coalition to extract concessions from developers worth an estimated $20 million, organizer Eric Arnold says in the film—including 90 affordable homes. With this tactic the same activists recently won a raft of benefits for arts groups in the Kaiser Convention Center redevelopment.

“Resilience” is too often a buzzword that serves to normalize communities’ capacity to withstand abuse, especially from the mouths of powerful people in media and politics. It’s also too flat for the dynamic artist-activists shown in Alice Street, who dance in the streets and navigate city bureaucracy with equal verve. “And then we marched over to the planning office,” recalls Arnold of one decisive action. “It was probably the first time they’ve heard music inside of that office.”

Inevitably some of the story lines in Alice Street go unresolved. The cultural stabilization strategies in the Downtown Oakland Specific Plan published last year derive partly from activism shown in the film, but supporters are disappointed with what little officials have done to enact them. Likewise, tenants of the city-owned Malonga continue to feel chronically neglected, with Williams of SambaFunk recently telling KQED its problems haven’t changed since 1998.

Still, the documentary also captures a heartening generational shift. Standout interviewees Beckford and Michael Lange, the actor and director, died before the film’s completion, but Alice Street shows their commitment to Oakland’s cultural life enduring in Lailan Sandra Huen, Anyka Barber, Casquelourd’s son Kiazi Malonga and others. Wilkinson, meanwhile, is developing educational curriculum to promote the community benefits agreement model beyond Oakland.

It probably doesn’t feel like a silver lining to the muralists, but the four walls of Universal Language haven’t been buffed or repainted. The artwork remains. Recently on Broadway, demolition exposed some mid-20th century advertisements on the side of a building, relics of a barely-recognizable city. It suggests the possibility that Universal Language could daylight again in the lifetime of Oakland’s current residents. The question is who among us will be here to see.

For People of Color, Gentrification is More a Curse than a Blessing

Posted on by

By Stacy M. Brown
BlackPressUSA

From a dowdy provincial city in the 1980s, Philadelphia has become a world-class urban center through gentrification – primarily through landmark architecture that now sets the city center and University City, apart.

“Over 50, and retirees, are moving back from the suburbs where they raised their children into Center City and the Italian Market where I have lived since 1980,” stated Dr. Margaret J. King, the director of The Center for Cultural Studies & Analysis in Philadelphia.

“Of course, gentrification brings money into the city, while it also drives up home prices – some houses have multiplied their asking prices 15 times over 40 years,” King noted.

“Housing is being restored and renovated, making more of the city habitable and in fact desirable. Now the suburbs have flipped into a working-class magnet as well as a market for Millennials who can’t afford center-city prices yet,” King stated.

Gentrification isn’t just an issue in Philadelphia – not by a long shot.

According to a March 2019 study by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC), more than 135,000 Black and Hispanics around the nation were displaced between 2000 and 2012.

Gentrification and displacement of long-time residents were most intense from 2000 to 2013 in the nation’s biggest cities, and rare in most other places, according to the study.

During those years, gentrification was concentrated in larger cities with vibrant economies but also appeared in smaller cities where it often impacted areas with the most amenities near central business districts.

In Washington, D.C., 20,000 Black residents were displaced, and in Portland, Oregon, 13 percent of the Black community was displaced over the more than decade period that was studied.

Seven cities accounted for nearly half of the gentrification nationally: New York City, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Baltimore, San Diego, and Chicago.

Washington, D.C., was the most gentrified city by percentage of eligible neighborhoods that experienced gentrification; New York City was the most gentrified by sheer volume, study authors noted.

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, gentrification is defined as the process of repairing and rebuilding homes and businesses in a deteriorating area, such as an urban neighborhood, accompanied by an influx of middle-class or affluent people and that often results in the displacement of earlier, usually poorer residents.

“Gentrification is rich people deciding they want a specific neighborhood as their own, and they get municipal backing, pay some money, and get all of the poor people out of there,” stated Mark Love, a New York realtor.

Neighborhoods were considered to be eligible to gentrify if, in 2000, they were in the lower 40 percent of home values and family incomes in that metropolitan area.

During the study, researchers found that most low- to moderate-income neighborhoods did not gentrify or revitalize.

Instead, they remained impoverished, untouched by investments and building booms that occurred in major cities, and vulnerable to future gentrification and displacement.

“When a neighborhood gentrifies, the cost of living increases, and it’s harder for low-income families to find housing, and that’s one of the biggest downsides,” stated Melanie Musson, a writer for ExpertInsuranceReviews.com.

“In a city like Philadelphia, neighborhoods are part of your identity. If you grow up in a neighborhood, you often want to remain living there your whole life because it’s who you are,” Musson stated.

“Unfortunately, sometimes, after several generations living in the same zip code, the newest generation has to find housing elsewhere because it’s too expensive to live where their home has always been,” she said.

Bruce Mirken, the media relations director for the nonprofit public, policy, and advocacy organization, The Greenlining Institute, said he lives in San Francisco and works in Oakland – two cities that are ground zero for the gentrification crisis in California.

“We see the most obvious results among the very low-income, who increasingly cannot keep a roof over their heads, leading to a growing homeless population,” Mirken stated.

“And homelessness in California has a distinct racial dynamic, tracing back through a long history of redlining and discrimination: Black Californians represent about six and a half percent of our state’s population, but about 40 percent of its homeless,” he noted.

In New York, where many residents are still growing accustomed to the decades-long gentrification of Harlem, the Bronx has forever been known as the city’s most urban borough. That’s quickly changing due to gentrification.

In November 2019, officials announced a $950 million, 4.3 acre, multi-tower, and mixed-use development along the Mott Haven waterfront. More than 1,300 high-end apartments are among the upgrades that are certain to price many long-time residents out of the area.

Mychal Johnson, a co-founding member of South Bronx Unite, told The Bronx Times that gentrification isn’t good for economically oppressed communities of color.

“It seems like the community board, and Borough president isn’t looking out for the community,” Johnson stated.

For the NCRC study, Shekinah Mitchell, the Neighborhood Partnerships Manager for the Virginia Local Initiatives Support Corporation, noted that, as the former capital of the Confederacy, Richmond’s history is steeped in racial oppression, inequality, and injustice.

Mitchell noted that, in 2016, Richmond had similar numbers of Black and White residents. From 2000 to 2016, the Black population decreased by seven percent, while the White population increased by 35 percent.

In 2000, Blacks were 57 percent of the population, and whites were 38 percent. In 2016, Blacks represented 47 percent and Whites were 46 percent of the population.

“This shift has come to the East End like a racialized wave crashing onto the shores of the neighborhood in currents of physical, cultural, and economic displacement. The Black community is drowning as we watch our land and culture swallowed up, block by block with no reprieve in sight,” Mitchell wrote in the report.

“Gentrification in the East End of Richmond is manifesting as a process of re-segregation,” she stated. “In Richmond, gentrification is colonization.”

In Portland, Oregon, an essay that accompanied the NCRC study noted that city as the “Whitest city of its size in the United States.”

The city’s White population currently stands at 77.4 percent while Blacks make up just 5.7 percent.

“Take a group of people who have been systematically denied wealth-building opportunities for generations, add low, stagnating incomes, throw in a subprime mortgage disaster, spiraling housing costs and wholesale community displacement, and you have a recipe for a severe economic backslide,” Cheryl Chandler-Roberts, executive director of Portland’s African American Alliance for Homeownership, said in the report.

“There is no African American community in Portland at this point,” Chandler-Roberts stated.

“It’s a scattered community.”

Banking is Changing. Its Lack of Diversity Must Change, Too, and Congress Can Help

Posted on by

By Rawan Elhalaby
CommonDreams

In Nicetown, a North Philadelphia neighborhood that was redlined in the 1930s, banks and mortgage brokers largely stay away. Lenders have been particularly stingy when it comes to home improvement loans. CREDIT: SARAH BLESENER FOR REVEAL NEWS

The financial industry is evolving quickly, but unfortunately it has remained static in one major way: Its leadership looks nothing like America.

That’s bad for communities of color, who will be the American majority in roughly 20 years, but it’s also bad for our whole economy.

At The Greenlining Institute, we regularly look at board and workforce diversity in agencies and private institutions across multiple sectors of the economy, including banks. In 2019, we studied the boards of directors of the ten largest banks operating in California, where we are based, and found that on average, people of color made up 30 percent of bank board composition, despite making up over 67 percent of California’s population.

Gender diversity was equally lacking, with women making up only 29 percent of bank board members. None of the 10 huge banks that we studied had more than 36 percent women board members.

These executive boards are the top decision-makers in financial institutions and drive the policies that ultimately impact our communities. Boards are accountable for the actions and behaviors of their institutions. They set the direction those institutions will go.

And those institutions often still don’t go in directions that help communities of color. My organization’s name, The Greenlining Institute, came from our founding purpose as the answer to redlining, the longstanding practice of denying loans and investment to communities of color. While long illegal, recent investigations by the investigative news organization Reveal found that redlining has not gone away; it persists in more subtle but still destructive forms.

SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT

Get our best delivered to your inbox.

On an annual basis, we request data from national institutions that operate in California. We track and rank banks on indicators that impact communities of color.

We consider transparency to be critical because data gives the public a full picture of the diversity and inclusion — or lack of it — within financial institutions, helping to keep them accountable to communities of color and inform data-driven policymaking.

Unfortunately, we regularly experience difficulty in obtaining such data, making it much harder to produce fair and thorough research and hold banks accountable. We believe that such data should be disclosed voluntarily by financial institutions, but Congress has a role to play as well.

We’re concerned about regulatory barriers that prevent banks from effectively serving low and moderate-income communities and communities of color by preventing banks from collecting and disclosing race data to the public. We urge lawmakers to look to existing regulations that require government agencies and private institutions to disclose data on diversity and inclusion practices.

Section 342 of the Dodd Frank Act created Offices of Minority and Women Inclusion in eight agencies. These OMWIs have worked to build up a robust infrastructure that includes internal assessments, crafting strategic plans, and increase diversity in their large agencies. This represents a good beginning, but we need more transparency from the banking industry itself. And we definitely need to look at the largely unregulated Fintech industry, which appears to be even less representative of our country’s diversity than conventional banking.

Ultimately, America’s economy cannot prosper if communities of color don’t prosper. A more diverse financial sector can help make that happen.

Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.

Bloomberg once blamed end of ‘redlining’ for 2008 collapse

Posted on by

By BRIAN SLODYSKO
The Associated Press

 

WASHINGTON (AP) — At the height of the 2008 economic collapse, then-New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the elimination of a discriminatory housing practice known as “redlining” was responsible for instigating the meltdown.

“It all started back when there was a lot of pressure on banks to make loans to everyone,” Bloomberg, now a Democratic presidential candidate, said at a forum that was hosted by Georgetown University in September 2008. “Redlining, if you remember, was the term where banks took whole neighborhoods and said, ‘People in these neighborhoods are poor, they’re not going to be able to pay off their mortgages, tell your salesmen don’t go into those areas.’”

He continued: “And then Congress got involved — local elected officials, as well — and said, ‘Oh that’s not fair, these people should be able to get credit.’ And once you started pushing in that direction, banks started making more and more loans where the credit of the person buying the house wasn’t as good as you would like.”

Bloomberg, a billionaire who built a media and financial services empire before turning to electoral politics, was correct that the financial crisis was triggered in part by banks extending loans to borrowers who were ill-suited to repay them. But by attributing the meltdown to the elimination of redlining, a practice used by banks to discriminate against minority borrowers, Bloomberg appears to be blaming policies intended to bring equality to the housing market.

The term redlining comes from the “red lines” those in the financial industry would draw on a map to denote areas deemed ineligible for credit, frequently based on race.

“It’s been well documented that the 2008 crash was caused by unethical, predatory lending that deliberately targeted communities of color,” said Debra Gore-Mann, president and CEO of the Greenlining Institute, a nonprofit that works for racial and economic justice. “People of color were sold trick loans with exploding interest rates designed to push them into foreclosure. Our communities of color and low income communities were the victims of the crash, not the cause.”

Campaign spokesman Stu Loeser said that Bloomberg “attacked predatory lending” as mayor and, if elected president, has a plan to “help a million more Black families buy a house, and counteract the effects of redlining and the subprime mortgage crisis.”

The campaign also pointed to efforts by Bloomberg’s private philanthropy to help other cities craft policies that will help reduce evictions. He promised in a January speech to do a version of the very thing he criticized in 2008: Ask lenders to update their credit-scoring models, “because millions of black households don’t have a credit score which is needed to get a mortgage.”

After this story was published, Loeser added: “He’s saying that something bad – the financial crisis – followed something good, which is the fight against redlining that he was part of as Mayor.”

Bloomberg’s 2008 remarks stand in contrast with the decades-long positions some of his rivals have held.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s work as a professor and attorney has been devoted to the study of bankruptcy and the disastrous impact it has on the financial well-being of families. As a young Delaware senator, Joe Biden held hearings on unfair lending practices and sponsored legislation to ban discrimination in lending and crack down on industry figures who did.

On Thursday, Warren criticized Bloomberg for suggesting the end of redlining caused the crash.

“Out-of-control greed by Wall Street and big banks, and the corruption that lets them control our government, caused the crash,” she tweeted.

“I’m surprised that someone running for the Democratic nomination thinks the economy would be better off if we just let banks be more overtly racist,” she said. “We need to confront the shameful legacy of discrimination, not lie about it like Mike Bloomberg.”

Bloomberg’s redlining remarks are the latest instance of his past comments by him that have resurfaced in recent days that make him appear racially insensitive.

On Tuesday, an audio recording ricocheted around social media of Bloomberg defending the police department’s use of the controversial “stop-and-frisk” tactic during a 2015 appearance at the Aspen Institute.

Full Coverage: Election 2020

Under the program, New York City police officers made it a routine practice to stop and search multitudes of mostly black and Hispanic men to see if they were carrying weapons.

Although he has since apologized for his support for the policy, in the recording Bloomberg said that “95%” of murders and murder victims are young male minorities and that “you can just take the description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops.” To combat crime, he said, “put a lot of cops where the crime is, which means in minority neighborhoods.”

Bloomberg’s resurfaced comments about redlining come as he’s in the midst of a two-day tour of the South that in part is focused on building relationships with black voters who are the backbone of the Democratic Party. On Thursday, he plans to launch “Mike for Black America”

Speaking to reporters in Tennessee on Wednesday, he refused to directly apologize for the 2015 comments. In response to repeated questions, he said, “I don’t think those words reflect how I led the most diverse city in the nation.”

“I apologized for the practice and the pain that it caused,” he said Wednesday. “It was five years ago. And, you know, it’s just not the way that I think, and it doesn’t reflect what I do every day.”

Introducing Bloomberg at an event in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Dr. Elenora Woods, president of the city’s NAACP chapter, said he would be a tireless fighter for economic justice for black Americans.

“Look, I know what racism looks like. I know what it looks like, and that’s not Mike Bloomberg,” she said.

House subcommittee scrutinizes diversity at biggest banks

Posted on by

By Meghan McCarty Carino
MarketPlace

Has Wall Street really become more diverse since the 2008 recession? Spencer Platt/Getty Images

The banking industry is coming under scrutiny on Capitol Hill Wednesday. A House Financial Services subcommittee is holding a hearing on diversity, or lack thereof, at the biggest banks in the country.

After the 2008 financial crisis and the reforms that followed with the Dodd-Frank Act, banks were supposed to become more accountable to the public, and part of that was by becoming more diverse.

“Because when people that are representative of our nation actually are in these positions, then communities of color get served better,” said Rawan Elhalaby, who was set to testify at the hearing on behalf of the Greenlining Institute, a nonprofit focused on economic justice.

She pointed to predatory lending that disproportionately hurt borrowers of color in the run-up to the Great Recession. Since then, she said, the industry has paid lip service to diversity and inclusion, “but we’re not seeing the data to really back that up.”

While Dodd-Frank reforms require monitoring of diversity at the biggest banks, it’s not clear how much has changed.

“Indeed, progress has been slow. It’s been glacial,” said Ronald Parker, president and CEO of the National Association of Securities Professionals, which advocates on behalf of women and minorities in the financial sector.

Parker points to a report by the House Diversity and Inclusion subcommittee last year that showed banks’ senior leadership and boards of directors are still mostly white and male, while not one of the biggest banks is led by a woman or person of color.

Greenlining Institute to Push for Bank Diversity at House Hearing Feb. 12

Posted on by Bruce Mirken

House Financial Services Subcommittee to Consider Diversity & Inclusion at Large Banks  

Contact:
Bruce Mirken, Greenlining Institute Media Relations Director, 510-926-4022; 415-846-7758 (cell), brucem@greenlining.org
Rawan Elhalaby, Greenlining Institute Senior Economic Equity Program Manager, 619-339-7955 (cell), rawane@greenlining.org

WASHINGTON – At a rare congressional hearing on diversity and inclusion (or in, many cases, the lack thereof) at America’s largest banks, Rawan Elhalaby of The Greenlining Institute will present her recent research on bank boards of directors, call for greater transparency, and argue for more aggressive efforts to promote diversity in the financial sector.

“Banks and other financial institutions often claim to make diversity and inclusion a high priority, but when you look behind the buzzwords, you often find far too little real progress, “said Elhalaby, author of Greenlining’s October 2019 report, 2019 Bank Board Diversity.

WHAT: House Committee on Financial Services, Subcommittee on Diversity and Inclusion Hearing, “A Review of Diversity and Inclusion at America’s Large Banks”

WHO: Rawan Elhalaby, Senior Economic Equity Program Manager, The Greenlining Institute; Kenneth Bentsen, President and Chief Executive Officer, Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association Diversity and Inclusion Council; Dr. Naomi Mercer, Senior Vice President, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, American Bankers Association; Subha Barry, President, Working Mother Media; members of the committee

WHERE: 2128 Rayburn House Office Building

WHEN: Wednesday, February 12, 10 a.m.

Elhalaby will be available for media interviews after the hearing.

To learn more about The Greenlining Institute, visit www.greenlining.org.

###

THE GREENLINING INSTITUTE
A Multi-Ethnic Public Policy, Research and Advocacy Institute
www.greenlining.org
@Greenlining

Greenlining Institute Disappointed at Judge’s OK of T-Mobile/Sprint Deal

Posted on by Bruce Mirken

Advocates Say Merger “Will Harm Communities of Color and Low-Income Communities Across California” 

Contact:
Bruce Mirken, Greenlining Institute Media Relations Director 415-846-7758 (cell)
Paul Goodman, Greenlining Institute Technology Equity Director, 831-325-8600 (cell)

OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA – The Greenlining Institute today expressed profound disappointment at a New York judge’s ruling that the controversial merger of T-Mobile and Sprint can go ahead. Greenlining Institute Technology Equity Director Paul Goodman made the following statement:

“We are profoundly disappointed that the judge approved a merger that will harm communities of color and low-income communities across California. T-Mobile’s tepid promises to offer low-cost services were contradicted by T-Mobile’s own experts, and T-Mobile’s commitments are too vague and full of loopholes to ensure that the merger is in the public interest. The Greenlining Institute will continue to fight the merger at the California Public Utilities Commission to ensure that communities of color have access to affordable, high quality service.

“The fact that information regarding the judge’s ruling leaked before the judge issued his decision is highly unusual and raises serious questions about a merger review process that has already been tarred by T-Mobile’s backroom dealings at the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice. We are saddened that the judge decided to reward such behavior.”

The lawsuit was filed in June in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan by attorneys general from 13 states and the District of Columbia. They argued that the merger would harm low-income customers by reducing competition in the telecommunications industry, leading to higher cellphone bills.

To learn more about The Greenlining Institute, visit www.greenlining.org.

###

THE GREENLINING INSTITUTE
A Multi-Ethnic Public Policy, Research and Advocacy Institute
www.greenlining.org
@Greenlining

‘This Merger Is a Monopolistic Disaster’: Consumer Groups Decry Approval of T-Mobile/Sprint Deal

Posted on by

By Jessica Corbett
CommonDreams

 

Consumer advocacy groups on Tuesday sharply condemned a federal judge’s decision to approve the planned merger of T-Mobile and Sprint, the nation’s third- and fourth-largest wireless carriers, warning that the $26.5 billion deal could lead to higher prices and worse service.

The group Public Citizen declared on Twitter that “this merger is a monopolistic disaster” and told consumers to “expect prices to rise and service to suffer.”

The ruling (pdf) Tuesday from Judge Victor Marrero of the U.S. District Court in Manhattan came in a lawsuit filed by the attorney generals of 13 states and the District of Columbia, which is the merger’s final hurdle. Critics have long denounced the deal as “blatantly anti-competitive,” but federal regulators signed off on it last year.

The U.S. Department of Justice approved the merger in July on the condition that Sprint sell off some parts to the satellite television provider Dish Network Corp. and Republicans on the Federal Communications Commission voted in favor of the deal in October—after Chairman Ajit Pai, an appointee of President Donald Trump, spent months advocating for it.

“From the start, this merger has been about massive corporate profits over all else, and despite the companies’ false claims, this deal will endanger wireless subscribers where it hurts most: their wallets.”
—New York Attorney General Letitia James

New York Attorney General Letitia James, who led the suit with California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, said in a statement that the coalition challenging the merger is considering its next step, including a possible appeal. She also urged Americans to hold the wireless providers accountable and expressed concerns about severe consequences if the deal goes through.

“Today’s decision marks a loss for every American who relies on their cell phone for work, to care for a family member, and to communicate with friends,” said James. “From the start, this merger has been about massive corporate profits over all else, and despite the companies’ false claims, this deal will endanger wireless subscribers where it hurts most: their wallets.”

“There is no doubt that reducing the mobile market from four to three will be bad for consumers, bad for workers, and bad for innovation, which is why the states stepped up and led this lawsuit,” she added. “We disagree with this decision wholeheartedly, and will continue to fight the kind of consumer-harming megamergers our antitrust laws were designed to prevent.”

Becerra echoed James’ comments in a statement, vowing that “our coalition is prepared to fight as long as necessary to protect innovation and competitive costs.”

Consumer advocates thanked the attorneys general for, in the words of Free Press vice president of policy and general counsel Matt Wood, “working so hard to stave off this terrible result.” Since news of the judge’s decision leaked late Wednesday, Wood has responded with a pair of statements.

“People already pay way too much and have hardly any choices in a consolidated mobile and broadband marketplace,” he said. “It’s hard to believe a sitting federal judge could be so unaware of the realities of this industry and the track record of phone and cable companies, but here we are.”

Wood accused Marrero of “showing a stunning lack of awareness and attention to the facts when he credits the claims of T-Mobile executives that their company will compete just the same as ever, even after swallowing its biggest rival for lower-priced service.” However, “the judge was not alone in willfully ignoring or failing to grasp the harms caused by removing a competitor from this already highly concentrated market,” he added, calling out Trump’s DOJ and FCC.

“The judge is showing a stunning lack of awareness and attention to the facts when he credits the claims of T-Mobile executives that their company will compete just the same as ever, even after swallowing its biggest rival for lower-priced service.”
—Matt Wood, Free Press

Ultimately, Wood warned, “this deal will be most harmful to the two carriers’ poorer and more urban customer base, who will pay dearly for this combination after yet another failure by our nation’s antitrust enforcers.”

In a statement, Greenlining Institute technology equity director Paul Goodman also expressed disappointment “that the judge approved a merger that will harm communities of color and low-income communities.”

“The fact that information regarding the judge’s ruling leaked before the judge issued his decision,” Goodman added, “is highly unusual and raises serious questions about a merger review process that has already been tarred by T-Mobile’s backroom dealings” at the DOJ and FCC.

Former FCC Commissioner and current Common Cause special adviser Michael Copps highlighted that “all of the evidence in this proceeding shows that this merger is inherently illegal under antitrust law” and “even evidence presented at the trial revealed the companies’ executives acknowledged prices for wireless service would rise if the merger was approved.”

Copps reiterated concerns that “low-income and marginalized communities who rely on more affordable services from T-Mobile and Sprint may find themselves displaced from wireless access” and commended the coalition of attorneys general.

“Robust and affordable broadband and voice services are essential to a 21st century democracy. A marketplace where Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile are allowed to call of the shots will only serve to widen the digital divide,” he said. “Our antitrust laws were designed to block blatantly anti-competitive mergers like this one. If our laws are no longer sufficient, then Congress must step in to improve them. Otherwise, we can expect to see more industry consolidation where consumers will pay the price.”

Open Markets Institute legal director Sandeep Vaheesan warned that Marrero’s ruling has broader consequences because it “empowers all corporations seeking dominance through mergers and acquisitions.” The judge’s decision, he said, “underscores the need for bright-line rules that deter harmful consolidation and channel business strategy toward product improvement and investment in new capacity.”

Meanwhile, T-Mobile CEO John Legere celebrated Marrero’s ruling as “a huge victory for this merger” and repeated his company’s claim that “the New T-Mobile will be a supercharged Un-carrier that is great for consumers and great for competition.” Sprint executive chairman Marcelo Claure said that “Judge Marrero’s decision validates our view that this merger is in the best interests of the U.S. economy and American consumers.”

The Hill noted Tuesday that “one judge and a California panel still need to sign off on the merger, though it’s unlikely either of those will kill the deal.”

«« Previous Posts∞Older Posts »»