Media

Last week was homecoming at many Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) around the country. It’s a week marked by events meant to bring alumni and students together to celebrate the unique missions and histories of their school. As an alumnus of Morehouse College, the nation’s only all-male HBCU, homecoming is special to me. I didn’t spend my week reveling with classmates at my alma mater, however.

On a late evening this past summer and without warning, one of the oldest buildings in Atlanta caught fire. Gaines Hall — a former dormitory on the campus of Morris Brown College — had been shuttered for years, closed when the school fell on hard times. After firefighters extinguished the two-alarm blaze, what was essentially left of the building was a charred red brick shell.

Voting Rights Groups Urge Immediate Action to Provide Required Registration Services through Federal Health Exchanges

WASHINGTON, DC – Today, in a letter to President Obama, three of the nation's leading voting rights organizations—Demos, Project Vote, and the League of Women Voters—urged the Administration to come into compliance with the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) by providing voter registration to eligible persons through the federally-facilitated health benefit exchanges set up under the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

Parents and students enter into an often complicated and opaque process when trying to secure financial aid, making some kind of financial discussion essentially a requirement for anyone hoping to successfully pay for college, said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank.

Clinton supports raising the federal minimum wage to $12 per hour. Despite minimum wage hikes by many state and local governments, and by high-profile employers like Walmart and Target, the federal minimum wage remains stuck at $7.25 per hour, the same rate it has been at since 2009. Many advocates of a higher minimum wage, including Clinton competitor Bernie Sanders, want a federal minimum wage of $15 per hour nationwide.

“The financial crisis and the Great Recession and its aftermath are hopefully the most significant economic calamity that this generation will experience,” said labor economist and policy analyst Catherine Ruetschlin, a visiting professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City [and Demos fellow].

Representative Paul Ryan, the increasingly-likely newest Speaker of the House, has a couple of stipulations before he accepts the job.

Critics — and even some supporters — of the program say its designations are arbitrary, and raise questions about whether the benefit should be rethought, expanded, or even eliminated.

Adding farming to the list could introduce further complexity, since farmers in the U.S. work mainly for for-profit business.