Media

The Missouri legislature keeps stomping on working people.

A point that climate change reports often fail to note is climate change will disproportionately harm people of color. People of color are overrepresented in the southern states, in the poorest counties, and among outdoor workers.

On August 31, Federal District Judge Amos Mazzant of Texas issued a ruling striking down the U.S. Department of Labor’s update to federal rules on overtime pay. Demos Associate Director of Policy and Research Amy Traub released the following statement:

“The dog whistle metaphor suggests that the dogs — the intended audience — hear the message clearly. That’s wrong. The code is designed to hide the actual dynamics from the target audience itself,” Ian Haney-López, author of Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class, told me.

“If we care about getting more people to and through college, we can’t do it on the cheap,” said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank. “We’re not going to get the outcomes we want, unless we put in the public investment necessary to do so.” [...]

How the Black, the poor, and the elderly suffered the most from Katrina, and how that remains relevant still today.

Illinois becomes 10th State to enact Automatic Voter Registration

New York – Demos applauds Governor Rauner and the Illinois Legislature on approving Senate Bill 1933, automatic voter registration (AVR) legislation. After a veto last year, the Illinois legislature unanimously approved SB 1933, which was signed into law by Governor Rauner. This bipartisan legislation will provide opt-in voter registration at DMV offices, as well as other government agencies.

In our recent research exploring the impacts of Oregon’s new Automatic Voter Registration (AVR) system in the 2016 election, we find that new voters who registered using AVR were more diverse than non-AVR voters. We also find that the individuals who were registered with AVR (including both individuals who voted in 2016 and those who did not) were more diverse than the non-AVR electorate.

While families across the country are sending their children back to school, immigrant families are under particular stress thanks to President Trump, who just pardoned Joe Arpaio, a former Arizona sheriff who openly racially profiled Latinos in “immigration patrols.”