"I think Greta has been able to speak truth to power in a way that has resonated with a lot of young people who are frustrated, who have lived their whole lives seeing inaction on climate change."
New York — Demos is please to announce that James Gustave ("Gus") Speth is joining Demos as its eighth Distinguished Senior Fellow. Speth comes to Demos after serving as Dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies from 1999-2009. Previously, he was Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme and chair of the UN Development Group. Earlier, he was founder and president of the World Resources Institute; professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center; chairman of the U.S.
Demos is dedicated to building a multi-racial, inclusive democracy. For 20 years, our research, advocacy, and litigation work has promoted and supported action and organizations to do just that.
Leaders with Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, Dēmos, and Forward Justice continue their efforts to engage, empower and protect returning citizens and their right to vote.
Would Re-establish Key Provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act—Limiting Risk Taking by Commercial Banks, Requiring Investment and Insurance Spin-offs, Ending Era of 'Too Big to Fail'
"Unions are what sent my cousins to college, they're what helped us go on vacation, they're what made sure that when there were hard times my family still had jobs."
"State officials are rightly wary of the goals of the commission because it does seem that the whole purpose for setting it up is to justify a preordained conclusion that somehow millions of votes were cast illegally in the last election," says Brenda Wright, vice president for policy and legal strategies at Demos, a progressive think tank. "That's the verdict, and now they want to hold a trial." [...]
“We think of education funding, particularly at the state level, as a spending issue, but it’s myopic,” said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank. “There are all kinds of second order effects to investing in education — homeownership or wealth building is certainly one of them. If you don’t spend the money on students now and that means that they’re less likely to go to college or they’re more likely to take on debt, that is going to impact their future economic activity.” [...]
Black students are far more likely to take on debt for a degree than white students, and young black households have more student debt despite fewer educational opportunities and a more uncertain payoff in the job market.
Without the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, lenders preying on communities of color would continue to pull in windfall gains, while widening the racial wealth gap and undermining the precarious financial stability of vulnerable households.
Demos (pronounced with long "e") — a public-policy group trying to shape a Democratic agenda on working-class issues like household indebtedness, college affordability and economic challenges facing young people — tested economic messages with an online survey of 1,536 registered voters in June.
To succeed in 2018 and 2020, Democrats need to run campaigns that actually motivate people to get out and vote, especially 20-somethings and struggling people of all races.
That means running unapologetically on the belief that inclusion and diversity is our nation’s strength, that government can and should ensure opportunity and a decent standard of living for its people and that democracy should work for the people, not just the wealthy and corporations.
FESSLER: Brenda Wright is with Demos, a liberal advocacy group. She notes that the main purpose of the motor voter law is to make it easier to register but also harder to remove legitimate voters from the rolls.
WRIGHT: The problems that DOJ should be focusing on are that too few eligible people have access to the vote and are voting. DOJ going after states to force them to do more purging is exactly the opposite of what the department should be doing.