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The language contained in some credit card agreements is written at a 27th-grade level, according to a new report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. And many cardholder agreements today contain language requiring a minimum of a 15th-grade education, the equivalent of three years of college.
Yet with only about half of U.S. adults reading above an eighth-grade level, the report said, credit card disclosures may be meaningless to millions of Americans.
New York, NY — Across the United States, a long-term under-investment in the people who make the mechanics of our elections function properly, and ensure that voters have proper access to ballots and functioning machines, is expected to be a key problem on Election Day, according to a new briefing paper by Demos, a national, non-partisan public policy and research center.
New York, NY — Today, 100 million Americans are involved with organizations or movements engaged in social change. Despite vast and quickly improving methods of communications and interconnectivity, many who work to "make a difference" are hobbled by technical barriers, often because there is no roadmap to connect these new information sharing methods.
New York, NY — More than 5 million Americans are directly denied the right to vote, and millions more are misinformed about their eligibility to vote, due to a confusing and archaic national patchwork of "felony disfranchisement" laws, according to a new briefing paper by Demos, a national, non-partisan public policy and research center.
Apart from our Republican-dominated federal government, no single entity boasts more lawsuits against it than Wal-Mart. Class action suits in motion at the moment read like a pamphlet from the nascent worker's rights movements of the early 20th century. They include: gender discrimination, racial discrimination, unpaid wages, exploitation of undocumented workers, pressure to work overtime or off the clock, and denied lunch breaks. And those are just the class action suits.
New York, NY — Millions of disabled and language-minority American citizens face impediments to voting because many states do not meet federal ballot and polling place access requirements, according to a new briefing paper by Demos, a national, non-partisan public policy and research center.
NEWARK, NJ — In an effort to increase voter participation in the Garden State, the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey and other high-profile voter rights' advocates, during a public forum today, will urge New Jersey to reform state election law to allow residents in future elections to register to vote up to and including Election Day. This proposal, if adopted, would replacing the current system under which anyone who registers less than 21 days before an election is barred from voting until the following election.
New York, NY — Provisional ballots could again be a leading concern at the polls this year, with new figures showing one in three — more than 650,000 of 2 million cast--were left uncounted or discarded in 2004, according to a new briefing paper by Demos, a national, non-partisan public policy and research center.