Demos welcomes the opportunity to submit comments to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Notice and Request for Comment concerning the Bureau’s definition of larger consumer reporting agencies (CRAs) that will be subject to the CFPB’s supervision.
States are spending less money on public colleges than they did in the past. According to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, adjusted for inflation, state support for public colleges and universities has fallen by about 26 percent per full-time student in the last 20 years.
Adjusted for inflation, state support for each full-time public-college student declined by 26.1 percent from 1990 to 2010, forcing students and their families to shoulder more of the cost of higher education at a time when family incomes were largely stagnant, according to a report released on Monday by the think tank Demos.
Here we go again. Another round of the game we call Congressional Creep. After months of haggling and debate, Congress finally passes reform legislation to fix a serious rupture in the body politic, and the president signs it into law. But the fight’s just begun, because the special interests immediately set out to win back what they lost when the reform became law.
Lucky enough to attend college, I sat in a first-year seminar meant to expose students to a variety of both subject matter and viewpoints. To this day I tell people about two books from that course that changed my life. One of those books was the very first overtly feminist book I ever read, Arlie Hochschild’s The Second Shift. This book transformed how I talked about the world and, thus, how I perceived it and engaged it. I became a feminist because caring was a kind of work which was ubiquitous, undervalued, and gendered and, as such, a matter of justice.
This is the fourth interview in the Black History Month series "Perspectives on Black Politics in the Age of Obama." It has been selectively edited for print, but the full audio will be available at wbai.org. The other interviews can be found at demos.org/rakim-brooks.
The young participants in Shake-A-Leg Miami’s Saturday program — mostly kids with physical and developmental challenges — arrive at the aquatic facility in Coconut Grove around noon each week to find some 30 students from MAST Academy waiting for them. Those high school volunteers come to organize kayak rides, basketball games and lunch. Yes, the Shake-a-Leg participants benefit tremendously. But those who gain the most are perhaps the volunteers, themselves.
Chairman Schumer, Ranking Member Alexander, and Members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to submit testimony on behalf of Demos for the record in support of the Democracy is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections Act of 2012. DISCLOSE is a straightforward solution to the serious and pressing problem of “dark” money in our elections. Congress has a responsibility to protect voters’ interests and the integrity of our democracy with common sense disclosure and disclaimer legislation. We urge you to move forward to enact these reforms without delay.
My brother, Andrew Goodman, was murdered by the Neshoba County Ku Klux Klan during Freedom Summer 1964 because he wanted to vote and figured all other Americans wanted that right, too.
For going on 14 years, the Florida Republican Party has fiddled and belittled the middle class. It isn't an act of God that's destroying the American Dream; it's petty, self-serving, greedy acts of Man, justified by a perversion of capitalism that's the equivalent of economic rape. Relentlessly, a political, ideological mind-set has been robbing generations of their "pursuit of happiness."
A lesson in how not to reduce gas prices: the White House is backing TransCanada’s bid to build the southern portion of the controversial pipeline Keystone XL pipeline. The section to be built will run from Cushing, Oklahoma to Texas and carry crude oil pumped in the Midwest to refineries in Texas and be completed by late 2013—so it will have virtually no impact on the current high gas prices.
Say you’ve got a booming industry, one that already employs 2 million workers in the U.S. and is poised to add 1.3 million additional jobs by 2020. Imagine that the jobs cannot be off-shored, that the work helps decrease federal deficits, and millions of Americans depend on the industry just to get through their daily lives.
While the attention of Connecticut's legislature has been occupied by the recent budget battles, an even larger crisis has been brewing: retirement security.
We are seeing the results of a radical shift in employer-provided retirement benefits. In the past decade, the percentage of private-sector Connecticut workers whose employer offers a retirement plan has fallen from 68 percent in 2001 to 58 percent today, effectively shutting nearly 650,000 workers out of any workplace retirement plan to supplement Social Security.
And while the quantity of benefits was declining, the quality of those benefits was deteriorating as well.
Warren Buffett once referred to derivatives as "financial weapons of mass destruction" created by "madmen." Real WMD have rarely been used. However, derivatives are used quite a lot, a $600 trillion per year market dominated by a narrow oligopoly of mega-banks. It appears that Italy got hit by the derivatives WMD in January.
Cuomo has made the politically expedient shortcut routine for major bills, just months after a judge chastised the practice. Even good-government groups that howled when previous governors used the measure far less frequently accepted it last week, which also happened to be the annual Sunshine Week dedicated to openness in government.
The decision by a governor overrides a committee system in the Senate and Assembly as well as the joint conference committees created under a reform that attempted to force at least some public debate on major policy issues.