How our work to enforce Section 7 of the National Voter Registration Act has resulted in over 3 million new voter registration applications through public assistance agencies.
Experian Boost comes with downsides for consumers, according to Amy Traub, associate director of research at the public policy group, Demos. She said lenders will be able to use the data they glean from consumer bank accounts in ways the public may not understand.
"It also allows them to make marketing decisions: who to promote which products to, how to get us hooked on the products that are most profitable and lucrative for the lender, " said Traub.
In his final hours as U.S. Attorney General last month, Jeff Sessions issued a memo limiting the Justice Department’s power to pursue and enforce federal consent decrees with local police departments. [...]
“This will allow the political leadership of DOJ to let abusive departments off the hook even when they haven’t instituted the reforms necessary to turn themselves around,” says Chiraag Bains, director of legal strategies at Demos and a former federal prosecutor with the Civil Rights Division under Obama's DOJ.
As Mark Huelsman, a policy analyst at Demos, an advocacy group tweeted: "the average family inheritance to a white college grad can pay off the average undergrad debt balance and have enough left over for a 20 percent down [payment] on a $575,000 home." That’s assuming the inheritor has student debt to begin with.
The Green New Deal is a vision for comprehensive national policy that addresses climate change at the scale and scope we need, creates living-wage jobs, and addresses racial and economic inequity by investing in communities.
The Trump administration’s latest attack on immigrants, a proposed rule that would punish families for accessing public benefits, has rightfully come under fire for its potential to threaten children’s health and impose financial hardship on households and communities.
Souls to the Polls is a time-honored tradition, often led by clergy, to activate and engage congregants to exercise their right to vote that starts long before Election Day. It is a mobilization strategy to make the process of voting easier for their congregants. But sadly, voter suppression efforts targeting minorities in subtle and overt ways continue to make Souls to the Polls a critical service — placing the burden of voter education and empowerment on the backs of churches and other civil society organizations, not the government.
December 10, 2018 is the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In 1948, in the aftermath of the fall of the Nazi regime, the United States joined many countries in the world and signed the Declaration. Several of the rights listed in the document were already within the U.S. Constitution, but some were not. We have done particularly poorly in living up to the Declaration’s call for a right to an adequate standard of living, including food, housing, and medical care.
We’re sort of in this really bizarre window where, for a number of reasons, many of the leading … candidates are sort of tripping over themselves to claim a progressive mantle,” said K. Sabeel Rahman, president of the left-leaning think tank Demos. “And we have to make sure that that progressive mantle means something really progressive. And that means we should set the table, and we should set that table now.”
Chiraag Bains, a former prosecutor and civil rights attorney at the U.S. Justice Department, said that because criminal codes are so complicated, prosecutors have an incredible amount of flexibility in deciding whether and how to bring a case. Prosecutors normally consider the culpability of the individual, the severity of the offense and what kind of penalty is necessary to deter future misconduct.
Home ownership is a major contributing factor to the racial wealth gap, as Demos, a left-of-center think tank, previously argued in a 2015 report. Seventy-three percent of white households own their home, Demos found; in sharp contrast, home ownership drops to 45 percent among black households.
Instead of putting money towards changing these systems — by funding efforts to make college free across the country or by making it easier for low-income students to get access to decent public K-12 education, for example — wealthy donors tend to funnel their money into causes that keep the system they benefited from in place, Giridharadas said.
Public-sector jobs in Massachusetts are more likely than private-sector jobs to be good jobs that provide a family-supporting income and wealth-building benefits. They need to be preserved.
Generations of black women have learned to be solution-oriented and resourceful, often ‘making a way out of no way,’ and their political participation is part of a history of survival.