Community Organizations, Economists, and Online Organizing Come Together to Ask, “Do Black Lives Matter to the Federal Reserve?”
By Victoria Ruiz, Demand Progress Campaigner
Last week, I represented Demand Progress and Make the Road New York at an inspiring Fed Up conference in Jackson Hole that brought together people fighting for economic recovery, corporate responsibility, and Black Lives Matter.
Demand Progress is a coalition member in the Fed Up Campaign, which is lead by the Center for Popular Democracy. The Fed Up campaign’s goal is to hold the Federal Reserve accountable to more than just big banks and lending corporations, but also to the workers and communities who make the economy possible. Every year, presidents of the Federal Reserve, their staff, economists from around the world, and members of financial federal departments convene in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. In the middle of Jackson National Park they meet at Jackson Lodge to discuss the future of the Federal Reserve and the United States’ economy. This year, 100 people from community organizations and their memberships from Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, Chicago, New York, Boston, Dallas, and Charlotte held a simultaneous convention, press conference, and community gathering.
People gathered at the same lodge at the same time as the Federal Reserve. Fed Up coalition members continued to demand that the Federal Reserve meet with community groups and think about what economic recovery means to low income communities and communities of color. The Federal Reserve is responsible for raising and lowering interest rates, which in turn impacts both inflation and the employment rate. Currently, inflation has been steady and the Federal Reserve is telling the public that the unemployment rate is improving. However, many community organizations tend to differ, when the unemployment rate amongst Black communities is an astonishing 9.1%, whereas the total population has an unemployment rate of 5.3%. Amador Rivas, a leader of Make the Road New York commented that this is at the same time “that communities are experiencing discrimination in both finding a job and in the work place, fighting for a living wage, and people are finally looking at the role of the Federal Reserve in Black Lives Matter. “
Community groups all around the country have been spending the past year meeting with regional presidents of the Federal Reserve and driving home the need to keep interest rates low as communities are still in economic recovery and experiencing high unemployment rates. The Federal Reserve is worried that low interest rates will spark higher inflation, but as a participant of the conference, I learned that there is room for inflation to grow without there being any type of travesty in the economy, despite the Federal Reserve often wanting to cite the economic collapse in 1977 that was caused due to inflation. However, we are no longer in 1977, collective bargaining power looks very different, wages, accounted for inflation, are lower for many industries today than in ‘77, and purchasing power is not at all at the same level. Therefore, inflation is not an acceptable reason to raise interest rates.
There was cross participation between the Fed Up and the Federal Reserve’s conferences. The chief economist of the AFL-CIO as well as members of the Federal Department of Commerce and staff of the Federal Reserve came and participated in Fed Up session and listened to testimonies of Black Lives Matter activists. Demand Progress worked with allies including CREDO Action, the Working Families Organization, and Daily Kos, to build a petition of over 110,000 signatures that participants delivered at the press conference. At a press conference held on a lawn directly outside of the Federal Reserve’s meeting, community members and economists including Joseph Stieglitz spoke to the importance of keeping interest rates low for the growth of the U.S. economy and for the majority of workers.
Josh Bivens, the Research and Policy Director from the Economic Policy Institute put it best when he commented, “Among other things, the Fed can do a lot to address inequality by allowing unemployment to fall to much lower levels.” Over 100 people traveling from across the country and showing the real-life relationship between the Federal Reserve and collective bargaining power, foreclosure, unemployment, education, taxes, and peoples’ general livelihood impressed the importance of the people behind the numbers.
