In response to yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling, which upheld a Michigan state law banning the consideration of race or ethnicity as a factor among state college admissions, Demos President Heather McGhee issued the following statement:
The country should be recommitting to diversity and inclusion, not retreating.
NEW YORK— Yesterday, New York joined ten states and the District of Columbia to enact a National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) proposal. NPVIC, if enacted, would award all of a state’s electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, ensuring the winner of the popular vote wins the presidency. NPVIC, which takes effect when enacted by states representing a majority of electors, has now received over half of the state laws it needs to be realized.
New York adopting the National Popular Vote proposal is a victory for democracy
Michael Lewis’ new book, “Flash Boys,” relates a real-life techno thriller in which a trader who identifies and ultimately thwarts a scheme deployed by piratical “High Frequency Traders” to squeeze a relatively small amount out of many stock transactions being executed electronically. As our hero’s trade bounced around hyperspace looking for the best price, the HFTs would detect its path, use their speed to get in front of the trade, and buy up the inventory so that the price of our hero’s trade could be dictated.
High-frequency trading (or “HFT”) is suddenly the financial market scandal of the day. Michael Lewis has published a book that was featured on Sunday in a 60 Minutes report and in a story in the New York Times Magazine. HFT is the use of high-powered computers, blazing fast connections with exchanges, and sophisticated trading algorithms to transact in time frames measured in milliseconds or shorter.
A recent ProPublica article points to a number of pending lawsuits aimed at restoring key federal protections against racial voting discrimination. Up until last summer, certain states and jurisdictions with histories of preventing African Americans from voting were forced to have all election changes cleared by the federal government before implementation.
NEW YORK, NY—Today, national public policy organization Demos released a new report detailing the impact of state disinvestment in higher education since the beginning of the Great Recession. The report release coincides with the launch of Higher Ed, Not Debt, a campaign with over 60 organizations dedicated to supporting borrowers, addressing unfair lending practices, and reining in soaring costs in higher education.
For higher education and student debt, this year’s budget mostly includes proposals we’ve seen from the Obama administration in previous budgets, speeches, or elsewhere.
As we await a decision from the Supreme Court in the McCutcheon v. FEC money in politics case, the Justices themselves heard from a protester who rose in the courtroom to proclaim that “money is not speech, corporations are not people” and to urge the Court to “overturn Citizens United.”
The ink is barely dry on the report from President Obama’s election administration commission and states are already disregarding its blue-ribbon recommendations, namely around early voting. The endorsement of expanding the voting period before Election Day was one of the strongest components of the bipartisan commission’s report.
Through the Procurement Act, Congress centralized management of government contracts and gave the president license to use his judgment in setting federal contracting practices.
ALBANY—Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman today announced new legislation to restore accountability and ensure access to the ballot box by eliminating baseless and intimidating challenges to voter eligibility at the polls on Election Day. Under current law, voters who are challenged at the polls are required to recite an oath affirming their right to vote. The challenger, on the other hand, has no such obligation.
NEW YORK—Today, Demos released the following statement applauding Attorney General Eric Holder’s support for restoring the voting rights of people with past felony convictions. Holder spoke at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C., saying “It is time to fundamentally reconsider laws that permanently disenfranchise people who are no longer under federal or state supervision.”
Demos’ Vice President of Legal Strategies, Brenda Wright, said this of the news:
When Louisiana lawmakers convened in 1898 to update the state constitution, one of the major complaints among them was that the recently ratified 15th Amendment prevented them from disenfranchising black people as they desired. The president of that convention, E.B. Kruttschnitt, proclaimed that a white majority would eventually overcome the 15th amendment’s voting rights mandate. Said Kruttschnitt:
The Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) includes 26 indicators to give a broader picture of the sustainability of growth. It is a better measure than GDP.
As more states across the U.S. (and more countries across the world) begin adopting alternative measures they find that while GDP has been increasing, other measures of well-being have remained flat.