On February 27th, 2008, David Rothstein testified before Cleveland City Council on the continuing foreclosure crisis in Greater Cleveland. Also in attendance were representatives from Senator Hilary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama’s Democratic Primary campaigns. Rothstein spoke about the spread of foreclosures (both in the city and the suburbs), the underlying reasons why the trend is one of expansion, and the effects of foreclosures on families and cities. His testimony ended with recommendations for stemming the tide and mitigating the consequences of the current crisis.

Below is video of the Foreclosure Forum. David Rothstein’s testimony begins 11 minutes and 30 seconds in.

Testimony

Read Foreclosure Growth in Ohio, 2007

Read Foreclosures in Cuyahoga County Communities

Crain’s Cleveland Business

By Jay Miller

Cleveland politicians and housing leaders who complained that the Democratic debate Tuesday evening didn’t focus on the most important issue to the region — vacant and abandoned housing — got a chance to bring up the subject today to representatives of the Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama campaigns at a Cleveland City Council forum on the problem.

“Even when they were in Nevada, they knew enough to talk about nuclear waste,” said Cleveland City Council president Martin Sweeney, referring to a concern of Nevadans that a nuclear waste storage facility might be built in their state.

Mark Weisman, who works for Cuyahoga County treasurer Jim Rokakis on the foreclosure problem, said he “watched in disbelief that it was not discussed at the debate.”

So, four panels of speakers proceeded to explain the various facets of the problem for Clinton campaign adviser Fred Hochberg, Obama adviser Mark Alexander and a small crowd of community activists.

Mr. Sweeney said City Council also sent invitations to the Republican candidates still standing, Mike Huckabee and John McCain. He said the Huckabee campaign couldn’t afford to make the meeting, but that the McCain camp 15 minutes before the start of the forum sent a message saying it wasn’t sending a representative.

The panelists offered solutions to various aspects of the crisis, from cleaning up the mortgage brokerage business to federal financial assistance for everything from mortgage counseling to the demolition of abandoned homes.

Sen. Clinton has called for a 90-day moratorium on home foreclosures, a five-year freeze on adjustments to variable-rate mortgages, and $30 billion in homeowners’ assistance.

Sen. Obama’s ideas for easing the problem include giving tax credits covering 10% of a struggling homeowner’s annual mortgage interest payments and offering financial assistance for victims of mortgage fraud.

Newhouse News Service

By John Farmer

CLEVELAND — NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, was a signature achievement for Hillary Clinton’s husband, an economic breakthrough, a political victory to celebrate. Now it may be a major liability in Hillary Clinton’s bid to beat Barack Obama in the Ohio Democratic primary Tuesday.

NAFTA, passed in 1993, eliminated most tariffs among the U.S., Canada and Mexico. It was President Bill Clinton’s principal contribution to globalization, but today it’s a weapon Barack Obama is using against Hillary Clinton to undercut her support among working-class Democrats.

In the intelligence trade it’s known as “blowback,” the unforeseen and usually dire consequence of what seemed a good idea at the time. It has put Hillary Clinton on the defensive in economically hard-hit Ohio and produced one of the sharpest, angriest exchanges between the two rivals.

It began with an Obama campaign flier over the weekend declaring that “ten years after NAFTA passed, Sen. Clinton said it was good for America.” Within hours Clinton angrily declared she had never said any such thing. “Shame on you, Barack Obama!” she fairly shouted.

Clinton has said she now favors a “time out” on trade deals. And this week she aired a television spot pledging a “fight to change trade deals like NAFTA.”

Not good enough, said Obama, who also favors a tougher line on all trade deals. He said Clinton can’t take credit for “the good things” her husband’s administration did and run from those that didn’t pan out, such as NAFTA.

In Tuesday night’s debate from Cleveland State University. Clinton claimed she was always a skeptic about NAFTA. She remained silent at the time, she acknowledged, but insisted she has opposed the treaty regularly as a senator — something Obama vigorously disputed.

“We will opt out of NAFTA unless we renegotiate it … on terms that will benefit all of America,” she said.

Obama said he agreed. “I think Senator Clinton has shifted positions on this,” he said, “and I think that’s a good thing.”

Until now trade generally has been a low-profile issue in the long Democratic campaign. But Ohio has a special beef with U.S. trade policy, which union activists and many Democrats blame for a steep manufacturing decline.

Only Michigan has suffered a greater loss of manufacturing jobs than the 265,000 (23.7 percent) Ohio over the past seven years, mostly as a result of corporate outsourcing and plant closings. It’s the worst jobs loss in Ohio “since the end of the Great Depression,” according to the American Manufacturing Trade Action Coalition, a manufacturers association.

“Trade is an issue here,” said Amy Hanauer, executive director of Policy Matters Ohio, an issue think tank, “and NAFTA is a proxy for trade. … It may hurt Hillary Clinton.”

The political consequences were made abundantly clear two years ago when Democratic Rep. Sherrod Brown unseated Republican Sen. Mike DeWine handily, chiefly by denouncing U.S. trade policy.

What’s at stake as the Democratic candidates argue about trade are the votes of one of Hillary Clinton’s prime constituencies — those earning $50,000 or less. Most such workers here are white, with high school educations or less.

Clinton’s lead in public opinion polls here, which one poll put at 21 percentage points last month, has shrunk to 10 points or less in the latest surveys. It’s unclear what role NAFTA may have played in that slide, but one leading Democrat here, who declined to be quoted by name because his boss is still uncommitted, sees it as critical.

“If Barack Obama wins Ohio,” he said, “it will be blowback from NAFTA.”

The Strickland Administration recently announced that it will cut $733 million from an already tight state budget. The plan will result in the closure of two state mental hospitals, a freeze in reimbursement rates for PASSPORT community-based care for the elderly, and the reduction of thousands of jobs at state agencies, just to name a few consequences. These cuts do more damage to an already weakened safety net, and do not address the root cause of this situation — misguided tax policies that favor wealthy individuals and remove billions of dollars from the state budget. In a committee hearing in the Ohio House of Representatives, Policy Matters Ohio testified about the failure of tax cuts to generate job growth in Ohio and suggested ways that we can reform our budget policy.

Full Testimony

Many Ohioans work hard but cannot make ends meet. Over 2.8 million Ohioans, approximately 25 percent, do not earn enough to meet basic needs. The gap between what these Ohioans earn and their basic family budgets, a hardships gap, forces many families to go without such necessities as health insurance or safe and enriching child care. Public work support programs such as Medicaid and child care assistance can help these families to bridge the hardships gap between what they earn and what they need to make basic ends meet.

This Policy Matters Ohio report shows that while public work supports help narrow the gap, nearly 2.1 million Ohioans (20 percent) continue to struggle. Many families either do not qualify for public work supports, the programs lack enough resources to cover everyone eligible, or the administrative process is too cumbersome. Eligibility requirements for public work support programs should be simplified, expanded to include more Ohioans, and should phase out slowly, so that an additional dollar of work-related earnings never results in a step backwards with more than a dollar in lost income. In the richest country in the world, with many of the world’s most profitable businesses, there is no reason that working people should be forced to choose between paying their rent or utility bills, putting food on the table, ensuring safe and enriching child care, or obtaining health care.

Press Release

Executive Summary

Full Report

The machinery for aiding displaced workers grinds inefficiently in Ohio

The Akron Beacon Journal

Ohio’s economy is in transition. New technologies are creating new industries and businesses and changing the labor-intensive, heavy industries of the past. The altered landscape places a high premium on a work force with the training and flexible skills to fill the new jobs. It also makes essential an efficient system to retrain displaced workers.

Unfortunately, the worker training services in Ohio are not up to the challenge. A study by Policy Matters Ohio released this month found several shortcomings in the state’s management of resources from the federal Workforce Investment Act. There’s no excuse for the weakness of the program. The need for worker services is much recognized and urgent.

Ted Strickland understands the urgency to improve the services. As a candidate for governor, he cited Ohio ranking next to last among the states in its use of federal WIA resources, spending 59 percent of federal allocations for work force training. The new report identified more weaknesses.

Ohio carries over large balances from year to year, particularly in Rapid Response funds, used to provide information and services to workers notified of layoffs. In the 2006-07 program year, the state spent a mere $10.5 million of the $29 million available.

Ohio serves far fewer workers than states with smaller populations, and Rapid Response is not standardized across the state. Further, there’s poor coordination between the federal and state work force programs. Between 2003 and 2006, the number of workers referred from the state re-employment program to the federal training and education program dropped from 1,400 to fewer than 100.

To its credit, the Strickland team has made improvements the past year. Ohio needs every dollar it can muster to train new as well as dislocated workers. Under a new federal law, the state could lose work force funds it does not spend. The Policy Matters Ohio study serves well in pointing out how Ohio can serve its workers more effectively.

With jobless rolls growing and the economy softening, Ohio’s workforce system needs immediate reforms to serve more unemployed workers and improve their access to training. Our ability to meet these challenges is vital to the future of these workers and for bipartisan public policy goals to make Ohio a more educated and prosperous state. The state’s most important employment and training program for unemployed workers, the federally-funded Workforce Investment Act (WIA) “dislocated worker” program, does not serve as many workers as it could and does not use all of the funding it receives. The report discusses major problems with the system and suggests key administrative and legislative reforms.

Key administrative reforms include, among others, requiring local areas to serve a minimum number dislocated workers, making use of best practices in rapid response services for workers about to be laid off, and removing procedures that limit access to training. Legislative reforms include policies that have been used successfully in other states to improve dislocated worker services: (1) extended unemployment compensation benefits for workers in training; and (2) state plant-closing legislation to fix loopholes in the federal WARN Act.

Press Release

Executive Summary

Full Report

Eighteen states and Washington D.C. are together spending nearly $2 billion each year in public benefits funds for clean energy to help break down existing market barriers to clean energy products and services, such as lack of awareness and high upfront costs. Across the 18 states, annual funds range from $2.3 million to $440 million. The state of Ohio collects $5 million each year, through a 9 cent monthly surcharge on electric utility bills, putting Ohio at the bottom of the pack. Ohio should strengthen its Advanced Energy Fund and use it to implement a statewide outreach campaign, provide customer rebates for green products such as solar panels, develop Ohio’s clean energy supply chain, and retrain Ohio’s workers for the green energy economy. Amanda Woodrum, Policy Liaison for Policy Matters Ohio, testified on February 5 to urge state representatives on the Public Utilities Committee to consider expanding Ohio’s Advanced Energy Fund as part of Senate Bill 221. Policy Matters applauds Ohio Speaker of the House Jon Husted for proposing to invest in Ohio’s clean energy economy. However, strengthening the Advanced Energy Fund makes more sense than creating a new energy fund based on a questionable income tax increment financing scheme.

Full Testimony

Read Investing to Re-Energize Ohio