Nation’s Mayors Support Gay Marriage But Complain About Unemployment

DC, Washington, United States (AHN) – The U.S. Conference of Mayors wrapped up its winter meeting Friday in Washington, D.C., with Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel stepping into controversies on same sex marriage and education.

Emanuel joined about 80 other mayors from across the nation in endorsing laws to give legal recognition to same sex marriage, along with the tax breaks and other benefits spouses can share.

The mayors signed on to a statement that said, “Our cities derive great strength from their diversity and gay and lesbian families are a crucial part. Studies have shown what we know through our hands-on experience that cities that celebrate and cultivate diversity are the places where creativity and ideas thrive.”

Emanuel supported the Illinois Legislature’s effort last year to legalize civil unions for same-sex couples.

He said New York did “a good thing” last June when state lawmakers legalized gay marriage.

In separate comments Friday, Emanuel discussed his plan to turn Chicago’s community colleges into training institutions for the city’s employers.

Currently, Chicago’s City Colleges have a graduation rate of about 7 percent and job prospects for graduates that are “not as high,” Emanuel said.

His plan calls for each of the city’s seven community colleges to operate with specialties, such as health care, transportation, hospitality and manufacturing.

In addition, employers would be brought in to develop curricula that would train the students to become their employees.

“I want it to have economic value” to attend college, Emanuel said at the downtown Washington hotel where about 250 mayors were meeting.

Turning colleges into job training institutions is controversial among some academics, who say a well-rounded education requires liberal arts courses that include literature, history and the arts.

Nevertheless, job creation and recovery from the economic disaster of the Great Recession were dominant themes throughout the meeting this week.

The U.S. Conference of Mayors released a report that said the nation’s metropolitan areas will struggle for five more years to regain jobs lost during the recession that started in September 2008.

“The recovery is very uneven across U.S. regions, with the southeastern and southwestern metro [areas that] were the most affected by the housing bubble looking ahead to years of recovery,” the report says.

U.S. nonfarm payrolls will grow about 1.3 percent this year, which is unlikely to reduce the unemployment rate below 8 percent, according to a report by IHS Global Insight.

The report predicts the nation will regain nearly half the jobs lost during the Great Recession by the end of 2012.

The mayors used the economic report to try to prod Congress to approve legislation that would create more jobs.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, president of the Conference of Mayors, said “Congress has jumped ship” in its obligation to stimulate the economy and employment.

However, Villaraigosa acknowledged cities will have a hard time squeezing money out of Congress at a time the federal government is trying to reduce its deficit by cutting spending.

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Plane Crashes Near Junction City Home

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This article ( Plane Crashes Near Junction City Home ) was originally developed by and is property of American Banking News . Checkout American Banking News for up-to-date banking news and peer to peer lending news.

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Modesto nonprofit executives get paid modestly

Big-buck salaries are not common for Modesto’s nonprofit executives, despite what one of the city’s housing agencies pays. Professional fund-raisers and nonprofit leaders expressed concern Tuesday about how much William Joe Gibbs earned at SCAP.

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Blue Labour can defeat the coalition

The Labour thinker puts a restored faith in working-class values at the heart of a project for the party’s renewal

The Labour tradition is far richer than its recent form of economic utilitarianism and political liberalism would suggest. Labour is a unique and paradoxical tradition that strengthens liberty and democracy, that combines faith and citizenship, patriotism and internationalism and is, at its best, radical and conservative.

That is the paradox that Blue Labour is trying to capture in order to renew the party and the movement as a powerful force for good. In order to do that Labour needs to recall its vocation as the democratic driver of the politics of the common good, a Labour politics that brings together immigrants and locals, Catholics and Protestants, Muslims and atheists, middle and working classes.

The resources for Labour’s renewal lie within the practices and history of the Labour movement. Blue Labour reminds the party that only democratic association can resist the power of capital and that the distinctive practices of the Labour movement are built upon reciprocity, mutuality and solidarity.

This is not a politics of nostalgia, as has been claimed over the past few weeks by some critics inside and outside Labour. It is a claim that practices and values crucial to what Labour is and stands for have either been forgotten, lost or wrongly downgraded in the party’s list of priorities. Nor is it a defence of a vanished working class; it is a claim that the ethical vision of a humane society which led working men and women to found the party in 1900 is still relevant and vital today. It’s good that the media is increasingly talking about Blue Labour, but “blue” should not be understood to denote insularity, fear of change and a rearguard action in defence of the white working class. By re-engaging with its history, Labour can revitalise Britain.

The Labour tradition understands something important about capitalism, which is that finance capital wishes to pursue the maximum returns on its investment. To that end it exerts great pressure to turn human beings and nature into commodities. Labour politics is rooted in the democratic resistance to the commodification of human beings. The organised workers who resisted their dispossession and exploitation called their party Labour to remind us of that. Democratic politics, according to this view, is the way citizens come together to protect the people and places that they love from danger. Britain’s forests, for instance, are more than an opportunity for the timber industry, as recent protests against privatisation amply demonstrated.

This always generates a rich and complex politics that is as much about cherishing what you know and love as about the pursuit of progressive ends. That is why Labour politics has always been radical and conservative, wishing to democratise ancient institutions such as parliament and the city councils.

Democratic resistance to the domination of capital through the pursuit of the common good is not really the way that liberals view politics or, more important, markets. They see the benefits but not the distress, the efficiencies but not the disruption, the choice but not the coercion. Labour has always understood both. This understanding is essential in defeating the liberal-led coalition – there is nothing conservative about this government – by developing a strong agenda for both regulating finance and generating regional private sector growth.

At London Citizens I worked on the Living Wage Campaign so that contracted-out cleaners, cooks and security guards could earn enough to feed their children without having to do two jobs.

I learned many things in those years and one of them was that, unless there were effective organisations, immigration led to a double exploitation, of the immigrants and of the locals. We ran a campaign called Strangers into Citizens so that illegal immigrants could build alliances and a common life with their new neighbours and colleagues. We ran the Living Wage Campaign to assert a common human status for all who worked in an enterprise or institution.

It was driven primarily by faith communities who asserted the dignity of labour and the importance of association. It was a resistance to the commodification of labour. The Catholics, Methodists, Pentecostals and Muslims I worked with did not talk to me about changing divorce laws or prohibiting civil partnerships, about abortion or the hijab. We spoke about a living wage, about establishing an interest rate ceiling of 20%, about affordable family housing and community land trusts and about achieving a common status as a citizen of the country. We spoke about matters of common concern where we had common interests. A common life between the old and the new required the establishment of relationships between what was divided. It required new work agreements so that all was not relentlessly up for grabs in an exclusively contractual churn.

The very simple idea of people’s relationships with others is what is at stake here. The centrality of one-to-one conversations, of relationship building, of establishing trust between what were seen as incompatible communities and interests transformed my understanding of what a politics of the common good could be, and of what Labour should be about. A political party that is a democratically organised force for the common good. In order to do this, Labour must establish those conversations that broker a common good within which party organisations such as Progress, the Fabians, Compass and the Christian Socialist Movement and Blue Labour talk and build a common programme.

Blue Labour has no nostalgia for old Labour and no illusions about the shortcomings of the new. Both Blair and Brown were recklessly naïve about finance capital and the City of London and relentlessly managerial in their methods. Blair developed a political alchemy that Brown failed to recreate, and it was between tradition and modernity. The problem was that his conception of tradition was superficial and his concept of modernisation verging on the demented: a conception of globalisation understood entirely on the terms set by finance capital.

The German economy with its worker representation on the management board, works councils, pension co-determination, regional banks and vocational regulation, in other words with high levels of democratic interference in the economy, emerged with a more efficient workforce, greater growth and with a genuinely modern industrial sector.

The paradox here is that vocational institutions decried as “pre-modern” and “Jurassic” preserved a knowledge culture that facilitated a more efficient response to globalisation than managerialism. The democratic representation of different economic interests turned out to be more efficient than leaving decision-making to the money managers. So Labour needs to engage with diverse interests in corporate governance and place greater stress on vocational rather than transferrable skills.

The control of the City of London in regional investment must be broken and local banks established that could enable people to have meaningful jobs and live closer to their parents. Modern economies require trust, institutions that uphold non-pecuniary values and strong constraints on capital. Again, this is not nostalgia but it does defy a view of modernisation defined by the unimpeded flow of money and people.

The withdrawal by New Labour from the economy led to a manic embrace of the state. New Labour’s public sector reforms were almost Maoist in their conception of year zero managerial restructuring. As an academic at London Metropolitan University I lost count of the number of line managers that were assigned to supervise and assess me, but I do know that departmental meetings were abolished and academics had no decision-making power. “Human resources” and “teaching and learning” laid down the law and there was no departmental mediation. This was typical of New Labour public sector reforms. Managerial, arrogant and ultimately doomed. Labour should know that, unless the workforce is engaged and committed, change remains, in the worst sense of the word, aspirational.

Old Labour was worse. Entirely disengaged from democracy in the economy, its renewal in our cities or in the party and held in thrall by an administrative and rational conception of the state and the use of scientific method to achieve its ends, by the 1970s it could barely generate the energy to win an election, let alone redistribute power to ordinary people. So there is plenty to talk about.

The starting point for Blue Labour is that the banking crisis of 2008 marked the end of New Labour economics and opens up the possibility for renewal. The tradition is strong and the party should honour it. In its explanation of the crash it must point to the volatility and vice of finance capital and the necessity of a balance of power within the firm and stronger institutions to constrain capital and domesticate its destructive energy.

The lessons of New Labour are not to have a contemptuous attitude to the lived experiences of people but work within them to craft a common story of what went wrong and how things can be better. To bring together previously separated political matter in the pursuit of the common good.

In his Fabian speech in January, Ed Miliband set out the direction of travel. He stated his opposition to the domination of capital and an exclusive reliance on the state for redress. He expressed a desire to “change the common sense of the age” through renewing democracy in politics and the economy and opening the space for people to build a better life together. The price of victory is a constructive alternative and it will be crafted by all elements of the tradition.

There are great times ahead for the Labour party. Labour Ed Miliband Trade unions Globalisation Maurice Glasman guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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Segarra Asks Commission To Hire Outside Counsel

Mayor Pedro Segarra has formally requested that the city’s ethics commission seek an opinion from an independent law firm on whether he has a conflict of interest because his spouse collects Section 8 housing subsidies as a landlord.

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City Leaders Celebrate Opening Of New Housing Development

Affordable housing options for families on the east side are looking up.

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Could a city housing authority keep $10M in San Juan?

There were a lot of “ifs” Tuesday night as the San Juan Capistrano City Council discussed squirreling away more than $10 million the state wants to take, and those “ifs” made city leaders nervous. Gov. Jerry Brown has proposed cutting redevelopment…

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Edmonton nurse lending a hand in Japan

Lucy the elephant is one of the most famous animals in Canada, a magnet for money and celebrity attention. This week, former Price is Right host Bob Barker offered to give the City of Edmonton …

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Midtown lost its biggest advocate at City Hall, what happens next?

By Jamal Thalji, Times Staff Writer Saturday, March 12, 2011

ST. PETERSBURG — Jamekka Harris wanted more for her cramped salon: she drew up a plan, held meetings, applied for a small business loan. She was eyeing a prime spot in a shopping plaza next to Midtown’s new supermarket.

But then she got nervous. Was it too risky? Wasn’t she doing good enough? She wasn’t sure what to do.

Then one day the door to her shop — and her future — opened wide.

In walked a tall, imposing man with a smoothly shaved head.

“You’re one of the first black women to qualify for this,” she recalled him saying that day in 2007. “You need to do this.”

She had never met Goliath Davis III before, then the city’s deputy mayor charged with developing Midtown.

Today, Meme’s Beauty Gallery occupies 1,500 square feet — triple its …

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Taxi rate boosts get OK: Charleston council also approves property deals

Charleston City Council approved two property deals Tuesday that should benefit low-income residents of the East Side, in the form of new public housing and a free dental clinic.

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Policing in Public Housing Leads City to Pay Some Plaintiffs

The city has settled with some plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit alleging discriminatory policies to enforce trespassing laws in public housing complexes.

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The case for a ‘big society’ bank

Will the ‘big society’ bank help social enterprises do bigger business, in the face of cuts? By Randeep Ramesh

There aren’t many people who would bet against Sir Ronald Cohen. He foresaw one of the biggest shifts in business in the last century – the rise of private equity – and his insight made him a multimillionaire. Yet eyebrows were raised when one of Labour’s biggest donors was wheeled out by the coalition to front the “big society” bank, which aims to finance a revolution in how we can all come together rather than come apart in an age of savage public spending cuts.

A compassionate capitalist who still supports Labour, Cohen views wealth as a force for good. He spent the best part of the last decade as chair of the Labour government’s social investment taskforce, calling for a bank to fund social entrepreneurs who wanted to fix Britain’s ills.

While Labour backed his ideas philosophically, it could not do so financially. The credit crunch meant Cohen only got £75m for his bank before the last election. The Tory-led government, painfully aware that society’s needs were increasing at a time of shrinking public expenditure, offered a better deal: £400m for a big society bank, funded in part by unclaimed deposits lying in high street banks.

“I should not be pusillanimous about it,” says Cohen. “It is tough for somebody like me [who supports Labour]. But just because it is the Conservative party, should I not lend my support? No. It’s good for the country.”

Having arrived in Britain as an 11-year-old refugee after his Jewish family were ejected from an Egypt convulsed by the Suez crisis, Cohen has long argued that those who succeed have a duty to give back to those at the bottom – warning that unequal societies would end up with a “wall of fire” separating haves and have-nots. He points out that the bottom half of society in the UK owns just 5% of the country’s wealth and 9% of the country’s households are below the poverty line.

“We have seen standards of living going up but a growing gap between rich and poor. Capitalism does not deal with its social consequences. The key thing here is not to raise taxation and then redistribute but to create a social state that is charged with dealing with capitalism’s social consequences”.

At first sight, the “social state” sounds like a modern-day variant of noblesse oblige, an ethical code where the rich stoop to lend the poor a hand occasionally. Like the big society, it is surely a cruel joke when public spending is being slashed and libraries and children’s centres are being closed?

Cohen accepts the big society bank “is not a substitute for the [government's spending] cuts” but will build up the skills and resources of intermediaries, providing funding to organisations such as the Charity Bank and Big Lottery Fund, which, in turn fund social enterprises. “The social state is not the private or public sector. It is something else.”

For the 65-year-old, neither government nor business can solve the thorny dilemmas posed by a turbo-capitalism that creates islands of wealth in a sea of poverty. What will resolve tensions and build community cohesion, he says, are social entrepreneurs who can develop innovative solutions to problems of poverty and inequality.

He sees the resizing of the state as an opportunity not a threat – likening today’s shake-out of government with what happened to the corporate world in the 1980s. When Cohen first started off in the City, the most familiar names in the postwar business world, such as ICI and Kodak, had begun to decline and shed jobs. The question then was what, if anything, would replace them?

Cohen decided to gamble by investing in tiny businesses that wanted to make it big. In TV talk, he was the first dragon to invite entrepreneurs into his den. Unlike the Hollywood image of Gordon Gekko excess, where private equity broke up businesses for profit regardless of social cost, Cohen was about helping small companies grow. His bets paid off and Apple, Waterstone’s and Tommy Hilfiger all emerged with Cohen’s help. In the process he became rich: amassing a £250m personal fortune.

He believes that this private equity model, where cash and expertise is injected into enterprises, could be replicated to create the social state. “You will need lots of things. More tax breaks for social entrepreneurs, a stock market for charities and a bank. But it is coming.” Not everyone is convinced. Peter Kyle, the deputy chief executive of the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations (Acevo), says it’s difficult to dream when the charitable sector is swallowing £5bn of cuts.

The spending crisis, Cohen insists, represents not danger but a chance for the not-for-profit sector. Cohen’s plan is to use the big society bank to attract cash from private investors, charitable foundations and philanthropists so that successful social-entrepreneurial ideas can be scaled up. He has already proved that small amounts of state action can attract private cash. His early pioneering work saw tax breaks created for funds investing in poorer areas such as east London. To take advantage Cohen set up Bridges, a social venture capital fund, in 2002 with £20m of government cash. It took the view that the poor represented pent-up spending power and funded low-cost gyms and hotels in what appeared to be desolate wastelands. The result: a return on investment of 15% per year. “That was achieved at a time of major recession. Nobody thought you could do it.”

Even more important is the social impact bond, which Cohen created in 2009 and sees as a way of making money and doing good at the same time. The first £5m bond was set up by Cohen’s social equity firm, Social Finance, with cash from “high net-worth individuals and foundations” and funded charities to resettle 3,000 ex-offenders in Peterborough in a bid to reduce reoffending.

If the scheme reduces crimes being committed by ex-offenders by at least 7.5%, then investors take a share of the savings made by the government. In seven years’ time the funders are looking for a £8m payout.

“In the case of reoffending there are multiple savings. You cut police costs, saving the Home Office money. You have families staying together, saving money for education and welfare. Only the Treasury can approve these cross-department savings and give a lead ministry the budget to pay for [the bond]. If you had 10 projects you’d have to pay out £80m but the government is saving double that.”

Social impact bond

In many ways the social impact bond demonstrates that Cohen’s ideas could work. It provides cash for social entrepreneurs; it transfers the risk to private investors; and it costs taxpayers only if the scheme works. If the promised improvements do not materialise then investors lose their money.

Bonds could be structured to cut school drop-out rates, reduce the number of children in care and even alleviate homelessness. The idea has been exported across the Atlantic. Earlier this month President Obama announced $100m (£61.5m) for seven pilot programmes using social impact, or “pay-for-success”, bonds.

Cash is flowing into the sector. The £200m in social investment in Britain will leap to £800m in a few years, says Cohen, as returns mount up. This, combined with the big society bank, will see social entrepreneurs able to access more than £1bn.

He says the real money will begin to arrive if the Charity Commission allows charitable foundations to make investments in schemes with a social object – every 1% of foundations’ £80bn assets diverted would bring £800m. An even bigger prize is to turn a sliver of the $23tn (£14tn) in financial capital at pension funds’ disposal into social capital.

In Cohen’s analysis, lack of money lies at the heart of the social sector’s problem: not-for-profits lack reliable revenue streams, and, as a consequence, end up inefficient and unable to scale up. Large charities, with annual income above £1m but below £10m, represent just 2.4% of the sector. Little wonder there are no Microsofts of the charity world. “The volatility in funding makes it impossible [to grow],” says Cohen.

As well as cash, the government will be key to bringing the “social state” into existence. Departments will have to allow social entrepreneurs to transform key public services and there will have to be foolproof mechanisms so that not-for-profits can be paid by results. “It’s a change of mindset but the growth could be hyperbolic,” says Cohen, who points out that in just three decades microfinance has grown from a village lending scheme in Bangladesh to a $40bn industry. “There’s a wave of social entrepreneurship that is sweeping the world and it is going to change it”. Social enterprises Public sector cuts Poverty Social exclusion Communities Banks and building societies Randeep Ramesh guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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Bing’s plan to relocate cops blasted by council

Some members of the Detroit City Council on Tuesday blasted Mayor Dave Bing’s plan to lure police officers to the city by offering housing incentives and asked why the program isn’t broader in scope. Saying the plan should be open to all city employees, opponents of the police incentive called for a special meeting to demand answers from the mayor’s office.

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Israeli Supreme Court orders Jerusalem to equalize education

Jerusalem, Israel David E. Miller – Arab residents of Jerusalem on Tuesday welcomed an Israeli Supreme Court decision ordering the city to provide their children with public schools or pay the tuition of private schools, but they remained skeptical that City Hall would be able to carry out the ruling.

The Supreme Court ruled that the state had five years to implement the ruling.

“This verdict will make the state responsible and accountable for what is going on in east Jerusalem,” attorney Tali Nir told The Media Line. “We know that there are thousands of children who try to get admitted to the public schools every year.”

Nir represented the Association for Civil Rights in Israel that filed the claim against the Ministry of Education and Jerusalem’s municipality. She said only half of Jerusalem’s 90,000 Palestinian pupils are registered in the city’s public school system due to lack of classrooms, forcing parents to pay hundreds of dollars a year in private tuition for education they should legally receive for free.

Nir said that in east Jerusalem, some 15,000 students attend schools funded by the Palestinian Authority, but 30,000 others had no other option but to resort to private schools.

“The socio-economic situation in east Jerusalem is very poor. Some 75 percent of families live below the poverty line,” Nir added. “Many families are paying for education which is a very basic human right, currently violated by the state of Israel.”

Huda Abu-Libdeh, a resident of the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Shuafat, grudgingly welcomed the decision. A mother of two boys who were refused admission to Jerusalem’s municipal schools, she said that despite the ruling she was not optimistic.

“The city should be able to solve the problem within one year, not five,” she told The Media Line. “Many mothers like me cannot find space for their children in schools, and today there’s no pressure on City Hall to act. They’re only kids, why should they suffer because there’s no space?”

As of 2009, some 61,000 Arab students learned in just over 2,000 classrooms in Jerusalem’s recognized school system, according to data collected by the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies (JIIS), a local think-tank. Only 47 new classrooms have been built annually for Arab pupils between 2006 and 2008, in contrast to the 81 classrooms built during the same period for Jewish educational institutions.

“For years, insufficient funds were allocated by the state and the municipal council to close the gap between the current situation and what is needed,” Chief Justice Dorit Beinisch wrote in the verdict.

Approximately 300 classrooms have been built by the Jerusalem municipality in east Jerusalem over the past 10 years, Nir admitted, but said that more than 1,000 classrooms were still missing to fulfill the need.

“It will be very difficult for the state to provide all the pupils’ needs within five years,” Dr. Maya Hoshen, a researcher at the JIIS told The Media Line. “However, the state can go a long way in closing the gaps.”

The Jerusalem municipality acknowledged the disparity between east and west Jerusalem, but said it would take time to fix.

“City Hall is aware of the existing gaps and the needs of east Jerusalem residents,” a spokesman for the Jerusalem Municipality told The Media Line in a written response. “The current situation is the result of decades of neglect. The Jerusalem municipality invests huge budgets in many issues regarding east Jerusalem, much more than in the west.”

The spokesman said that lack of zoning permits for educational institutions in east Jerusalem was the main cause for the shortage of classrooms. He added that the municipality has been tackling a shortage of 700 classrooms by renting existing buildings and hauling in mobile classrooms. The city is in the midst of planning the construction of 248 additional classrooms, the spokesman said.

Most of Jerusalem’s 270,000 Arab residents, or 35 percent of the city’s population, were incorporated in the city’s municipal boundaries following the 1967 Six-Day War. The “Jerusalem Law” passed by Israel’s legislature in 1980 established Jerusalem’s status as Israel’s undivided capital city, but most countries do not acknowledge the annexation of post-1967 territories to Jerusalem. Palestinians have also claimed it as the capital of their future state.

Critics say that deep cleavages in municipal investment between mostly Arab east Jerusalem and largely Jewish west Jerusalem have left the city divided in practice. But Dr. Hoshen of JIIS said that the municipality has recently allocated significant funds to build cutting edge schools for residents of east Jerusalem.

“There are some special education schools, such as one in the neighborhood of Ras Al-Amoud, that are the latest word in education,” she said. “In Sur Baher, a minefield was cleared to build a new school which is truly state of the art.”

Huda Abu-Libdeh, whose children were included in the lawsuit against the state, said she would not give up the cause even after her children are entered in the public system.

“I want to help other mothers in my situation,” she said.

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Mob made $ in construction across city

The housing boom that swept the nation spawned glittering luxury condo towers across New York City and was a windfall for developers, banks, mortgage brokers – and the mob.

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