CAP Convenes National Advisory Council on the Black-White Wealth Gap

Even enacting six ambitious proposals — debt-free college and the cancellation of student loans, a national savings plan and baby bonds, among others — wouldn’t be enough to close the black-white wealth gap in America by 2060, says the Center for American Progress. So CAP is convening what it’s calling the National Advisory Council on Eliminating the Black-White Wealth Gap.

According to a CAP press release, the National Advisory Council “will be charged with generating new ideas for closing the gap and outlining clear actions for an incoming administration to take within its first 100 days.” (Which the incoming administration will be free to ignore if it chooses since this council is solely a CAP invention.)

On the council are ten experts in economics, history, public policy and presidential transitions, including Mehrsa Baradaran, Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Ibram X. Kendi, and others.

After High-Profile Confrontations With Police, Street Vendors in DC and New York Team Up

In November, police officers handcuffed and arrested a churro vendor in New York inside the Broadway Junction station (Mayor Bill de Blasio said the woman “was told multiple times that’s not a place you can be and it’s against the law” prior to her arrest). Later that same month, a teenager selling elote in Washington, D.C.’s Columbia Heights neighborhood was pushed to the ground and injured by police for selling goods as a minor and without a license.

Now, reports DCist, that teenager — Genesis Lemus — and her mother, Ana, traveled to New York to meet with street vendors and activists there in the hope of bringing the street vendor movement back to DC.

“We are going to get more involved because this has to change. It’s not fair what happens to the street vendors,” Ana Lemus told DCist, in Spanish. “It’s possible that we [in different cities] will all get together to do something because my daughter wants to support every street vendor.”

Activists in both cities are planning an action tentatively scheduled for the end of December.

DC’s Largest Transit Union Reaches Agreement With Transit Authority

Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) and its largest union have reached a deal on a four-year contract that will include WMATA giving up on privatizing some of its operations, the Washington Post reports.

Privatization has been a strategy pursued by Metro General Manager Paul J. Wiedefeld since April 2017, when he said that parts of Metro’s operations could be privatized to save the transit authority money. Opposition has centered around Metro’s privatization of the Cinder Bed Road garage, which serves as headquarters for 18 bus routes. This is the first strike involving Metro employees in four decades.

Raymond Jackson, president of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 689, which represents some 8,000 Metro employees, told the Post that he is “pleased to have a deal that I can recommend to my members.”