[T]he pain of retail sector hemorrhaging will be most severe for Black workers considering retail is the second largest Black population employer. Nearly 12 percent of retail workers are Black – close to their overall population ratio. And 54 percent of Black retail workers are supporting households, according to think tank Demos, the highest proportion of any demographic group in that sector. Black retail workers also suffer the highest poverty rates.
According to Amy Traub of the think tank Demos, “many advocates are worried that it’s the beginning of a larger effort to undo the CFPB’s successful work of protecting consumers.” The payday-lending sector has historically preyed on poor, “underbanked” communities, marketing short-term loans at astronomically high interest rates. Payday loans trade on exploitative debt schemes, as borrowers spiral into a deepening cycle of repeated over-borrowing and financial crisis.
The Bill of Rights has been a central touchstone for Americans throughout history, especially when faced with existential challenges to the legitimacy of American government.
Co-host Mika Brzezinski led the discussion joined by two guests, Bari Weiss, a staff writer and editor for the Opinion section of The New York Times, and Heather McGhee, president of Demos, a progressive think tank in New York. [...]
But it got better yet when Brzezinski brought McGheeinto the conversation.
[M]ark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at the think tank Demos, who focuses on student debt, says “we’ll see more and more” programs like Mission Scholarships. “There’s everything right with an institution looking at a labor market shortage” and trying to ameliorate it. “Free education is an obvious carrot.” [...]
The event supported what some experts are saying: that the sanctuary movement is growing nationally.
“It’s a very profound and active form of resistance that has really been sweeping the country,” said Katherine Culliton-Gonzalez, senior counsel at Demos, a national nonpartisan, nonprofit group fighting for democracy. “It’s not only helping individual immigrants but raising awareness, and it’s a moral call as well as a legal call.”
Trump’s recent comments against immigrants from El Salvador, Haiti and Africa are indeed shocking but remember, they are not inconsistent with his policies.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard our Ohio voter purge case, Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute. At issue in the case is Ohio’s Supplemental Process, an unjust practice of removing infrequent voters from its registration rolls.
Six other states — Georgia, Montana, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania and West Virginia — have similar practices that target voters for removal from the rolls for not voting, but Ohio’s is the most extreme.
“The National Voting Rights Act sought to eliminate practices such as Ohio’s that penalize people who exercise their right not to vote,” Stuart Naifeh, senior counsel at the liberal think tank Demos, said in a call with reporters last week.
"None of these voters had become ineligible to vote by reason of a change in residence or otherwise," the voting rights group Demos, representing the A. Philip Randolph Institute, argued in court papers. "Nonetheless, all had been purged from the rolls." [...]
But Stuart Naifeh of Demos says about four in five voters who receive the notices don't send them back. “People don’t look at their mail all that closely,” he says.
“They want the ability to use non-voting to remove people,” Demos senior counsel Stuart Naifeh, who is representing the Ohio challengers, told TPM. “And in these cases that they’ve brought or threatened to bring, they want counties or states to adopt that as a practice.”
The D.C. Council unanimously backed publicly financed campaigns Tuesday, a move lauded by clean-government advocates in a city long plagued by its association with a pay-to-play culture.[...]
As the Trump Administration takes the unprecedented action of de-legalizing nearly a million residents, a Clean DREAM Act with TPS is urgent—leaders of both parties in Congress must act.
The justices will hear arguments in Republican-governed Ohio’s appeal of a lower court ruling that blocked its policy of erasing from voter registration lists people who do not regularly cast a ballot. Under the policy, such registration is deleted if the person goes six years without either voting or contacting state voting officials.
The U.S. Supreme Court will decide on a Trump-backed Ohio voting rights policy that has disenfranchised thousands of American voters by using lists to purge names of those who vote infrequently.
Thousands of Americans will die because of an attack on Obamacare in the Republican tax cut bill. This is the conclusion of the economist Lawrence Summers, based on a review of the scholarly research on the impact of not having health insurance.