The American Society of Civil Engineers gives America’s infrastructure a D+ grade. No doubt, if they focused on just the infrastructure serving majority African American communities, America’s “black infrastructure” would receive a failing grade. A key purpose of racial segregation is to allow the dominant group to under-invest and under-develop the infrastructure serving the minority group. [...]
Kathy Culliton-Gonzalez, a lawyer who works on automatic voter registration at Demos, a progressive think tank, said some of the momentum toward automatic voter registration was born out of the controversy surrounding the results of the 2000 election, long lines to vote across the country in the 2012 election and efforts to pass voter ID laws to make it more difficult to vote.
New York should be expanding voters’ rights, demonstrating what real democracy looks like. We should ensure working moms and dads, immigrants and people of color have equal access and voice in our electoral system. In the face of an imminent federal onslaught, we should be saying unequivocally that we stand for good government of the people, by the people and for the people. [...]
"One thing driving Labour’s over performance was youth turnouts," Sean McElwee, a policy analyst who studies voter attitudes and behavior at the progressive think tank Demos, said in an interview.
McElwee thinks that Labour’s success could be a model for progressives in the United States provided they learn some key lessons about how to enlist and galvanize voters.
This difference stems largely from the historical advantages built into whiteness, and the severe historical economic cost of blackness. Many of these advantages were covered in the Demos and IASP report titled "The Asset Value of Whiteness."
Amy Traub for Demos: If you want to make crime pay — and get a lighter penalty if you're caught — you're better off cheating your employees out of their fair wages than trying to nick the latest video game console or pair of designer shoes off the shelves of your local retailer. [...]
The California legislature is pushing its own ambitious legislation, and is one of several Western states teaming up with Canadian provinces to collaborate on climate solutions. Many now see New York, and the CCPA in particular, as presenting the next opportunity for promising state-level action.
“The EAC is responsible for creating voting systems guidelines that are intended to help ensure the accuracy and accessibility and security of voting systems that states use,” Brenda Wright, vice president for policy and legal strategies for the public policy group Demos, said in a phone interview.
"It's very concerning," said Brenda Wright, vice president of policy and legal strategies at Demos, a liberal advocacy group that's been fighting state efforts to purge voters from the rolls. Wright notes that the main purpose of the motor voter law is to expand opportunities to register to vote, but that millions of eligible Americans are still unregistered.
“It indicates that the focus of DOJ is going to be on pushing states to take more and more people off the rolls, instead of enforcing the provisions of the NVRA that assist voters in getting registered and staying on the rolls,” said Brenda Wright, vice president of policy and legal strategies at the progressive policy and legal group Demos.
Brenda Wright, a lawyer at the left-leaning advocacy organization Demos, emphasizes that progressives want voter rolls to be accurate. What her group opposes, she said, are purging practices that are known to sweep up eligible voters.
The bottom half of American households now controls less than 5 percent of our total net worth. Our republican founders could not have imagined a distribution of wealth so concentrated, nor a democracy so threatened by the rule of property.
As President Obama takes office, and the nation reflects on the historic moment and its significance, Demos Senior Fellows John Schwarz and Lew Daly remind us that America is more than just “common blood, or race, or ethnic background or religion.” America is about freedom, they argue, and its up to government to help establish the conditions for economic independence that have become central to the ideals of American freedom.
Senior Fellow Algernon Austin and Jared Bernstein discuss how the "bad culture" arguments about African-Americans are misguided at best and destructive at worst. By creating an erroneous causal link between "bad culture" and black poverty, the "Cosby consensus" prevents the country from recognizing success and building on it to create the economic opportunities that are missing for too many African-Americans.
The children of the New Economy have responded to the economic disparity and social insecurities in our schools, neighborhoods and workplaces with a backlash against government bashing.
In the past 15 years the ramifications of poor credit have grown, as credit score "mission creep" has set in, said Amy Traub, a senior policy analyst with the New York-based think tank Demos and author of the recently released report "Discrediting America." Credit scores determine not just the interest rates paid on material goods, such as a cell phone or car, but also the pricing of utilities and insurance. Approximately 60 percent of employers use credit reports to screen job applicants.
“The middle class is not on the same solid footing that it once was,” said Jennifer Wheary, who cowrote a study on the recession’s impact on middle-class African Americans and Latinos with Brandeis University and the New York think tank Demos.