* This essay is adapted from a lecture delivered on the occasion of the award of the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa to Bina Agarwal at the Lustrum Ceremony of the 55th Anniversary of the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, The Netherlands, October 18, 2007.
INTRODUCTION: GOING DEEPER THAN STRATEGIC COMMUNICATION
A popular recent meme on liberal social networks and left-leaning blogs summarizes ideological differences as follows:
While the partisan message is clear (only with liberalism's compassionate box-stacking does everyone get to watch baseball), conservative and libertarian critics of liberal equality also helped spread the image, mocking the inherent unfairness of giving some peo
INTRODUCTION
In the three decades after the Second World War, low- and middle-income households enjoyed income gains that grew in tandem with rising GDP levels and actually outpaced the gains enjoyed by the richest households. In short, if you wanted to report how “the U.S. economy was doing” or “how the U.S. economy was working for the vast majority,” you could just recite overall income growth rates.
Our data sets were provided and cleaned by Public Campaign. For the purposes of this report, Public Campaign used federal campaign contribution data made public by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and then refined and augmented by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP).
Fast food companies keep employees at poverty-level wages while reaping billions of dollars in profits. It drives inequality, slows growth, and lowers living standards.
In Citizens United v. FEC, the U.S. Supreme Court held that corporations were free to use money from the corporation’s treasury on political activity.1 Setting aside for a moment the many criticisms of the decision, Citizens United left open a number of questions about who at a corporation should get to decide when a corporation spends money on politics. It has fallen to our system of corporate law to provide an answer.
This is the third of several papers examining the underlying validity of the assertion that regulation of the financial markets is unduly burdensome. These papers assert that the value of the financial markets is often mis-measured. The efficiency of the market in intermediating flows between capital investors and capital users (like manufacturing and service businesses, individuals and governments) is the proper measure. Unregulated markets are found to be chronically inefficient using this standard. This costs the economy enormous amounts each year.
Dramatic new public policy initiatives are needed to accomplish two broad interrelated goals: to ensure that all Americans have a chance to move into the middle class and, second, to ensure greater security for those in the middle class.
Good Afternoon. My name is Amy Traub and I am a senior policy analyst at Demos. We are a public policy organization working for an America where we all have an equal say in our democracy and an equal chance in our economy. I would like to thank the Progressive Caucus for this opportunity to provide testimony on our recent research.
I thank the committee for this opportunity to present testimony on the IDC’s campaign finance reform proposal. This testimony is submitted on behalf of myself and Miles Rapoport, President of Demos and former Secretary of the State of Connecticut.
Connecticut has offered a voluntary public financing system for state-wide constitutional and General Assembly offices since 2008. Through financing from the Citizens' Election Fund, candidates that obtain the required number of small donations can receive a lump sum to fund their campaign. The program is very popular and in 2012, 77 percent of successful candidates were publicly financed.
As former and present Secretaries of the State of Connecticut, we are very proud of our state for broadening our democracy by adopting a public financing system for our legislative and statewide campaigns. As former legislators, we understand intimately the fundraising aspects of standing for election, and as Secretaries of the State we have been responsible for administration and implementation of campaign finance laws.