“Demos strongly supports the Democracy for All resolution and calls on all senators to vote to send it to the states for ratification as the Twenty Eighth Amendment.
In a record-breaking demonstration of support, over one million commenters have submitted comments to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) calling on the agency to take immediate steps to require publicly traded corporations to disclose their use of corporate resources for political purposes to their shareholders.
(New York, New York) – Almost five years after the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC granted new rights to business corporations to spend unlimited corporate resources to influence elections, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has yet to act to require disclosure of political spending.
When you find a leak, do you jump up and point at it? Yell about it? What if the leak is part of a massive flood? Do you call up your friends and make plans to build a dam? What if the leak comes at you when you’ve been trapped in a basement with floodwater rising up to your neck?
Early Wednesday morning, many media outlets were buzzing with news of a leak.
President Obama should sign a Good Jobs executive order to encourage contractors to improve workplace benefits and respect their employees’ rights to bargain collectively.
Workers at many of the nation’s largest and most profitable employers struggle to get enough work hours (and sufficiently stable hours) to make ends meet, making fair scheduling as important as raising wages for millions of workers.
In May 2013, low-wage workers in federal buildings in Washington began walking off the job in a series of one-day strikes. Employed by concessionaires and janitorial contractors at places like the Smithsonian and the Ronald Reagan Building, the workers said their rock-bottom wages weren't enough to survive on. Like the Walmart and fast-food workers also going on strike, they asked for better working conditions and a greater share of the spoils.
Reformers in Washington are looking for a few good scandals.
Watergate led to the biggest overhaul of campaign finance law in the past century. Outrage over donors sleeping in the Lincoln Bedroom and Enron influence peddling helped spur the 2002 McCain-Feingold overhaul. And the Jack Abramoff affair got Congress to act quickly on lobbying and ethics reform.
Today, President Obama will sign an Executive Order that will encourage federal agencies to not contract with companies that violate labor laws, and require federal contractors to disclose any record of wage, labor and anti-discrimination law violations.
When Walmart pays its workers so little that they need food stamps to survive, they're also investing in a steady profit stream. Even though their prices are roughly the same or even more than their local competition, Walmart's excessive marketing of "low prices" makes them a first-choice supermarket for people living in poverty, including their employees.
Nate Silver has already dubbed the 2014 election as "the least important in years." But this year's midterms are still breaking records for at least one thing: Secret political spending.
Eliminating poverty seems like an impossibly utopian goal, but it's actually pretty easy: we can just give people enough money that they're above the poverty line. That idea, known as a basic income, has been around forever, but it's made a comeback in recent years.
Demos Policy Analyst Robert Hiltonsmith testifies before the Congressional Progressive Caucus on wage theft and its effects on the earnings of low-income workers.