Media

“Because of the growth of the prison industry, you’re having these artificial shifts that empower the rural communities but take power away from the urban communities,” Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, told me.

That is wrong.

In 2012, Demos — a public policy organization that battles inequality in the U.S. — submitted testimony to the U.S. Census Bureau’s National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic and Other Populations urging it to find a solution to “prison-based gerrymandering.”

Voter registration has been making headlines quite a bit this month. 

The significance of National Voter Registration Day has never been clearer to me than when I found myself in Tulsa, fighting for the voting rights of Oklahomans.

Demos, a public policy organization, published a report that demonstrated if the rate of homeownership by people of color would increase, the racial wealth gap would substantially reduce the racial wealth gap. “Black and Latino homeowners saw less return in wealth on their investment in homeownership: for every $1 in wealth that accrues to median Black households as a result of homeownership, median white households accrue $1.34,” states the report. 

This morning’s routine was going well — make coffee, pour juice, cut fruit, listen to NPR. The reporter was interviewing a former ambassador to the Vatican who was saying that the Pope’s views on climate could establish a new moral grounding for US public opinion, if only he would back off on the criticism of voracious capitalism. The former ambassador patronized the Pontiff, conjecturing that his holiness was only familiar with corrupt South American businesses, being unfamiliar with the far more ethical businesses of the developed world.

Among mortgage professionals, it is widely held that owning a home is how many Americans build wealth. As the private mortgage market has failed to make loans available to Black homebuyers, our community suffers from a limited ability to create wealth through this reliable and proven method.

I propose a far-reaching agenda to fix Quarterly Capitalism, equal to the task of shifting traderscorporate America away from an obsession with short-termism and toward creating shared productivity. These proposals are complementary and non-exclusive, but the problem of Quarterly Capitalism and short-termism is so embedded in the economy that a layered approach is needed.

Not that many people vote in midterm elections. While 57.5 percent of eligible voters cast ballots in the 2012 presidential race, a mere 41.9 percent did in 2014, according to data from the Census Bureau. Midterm turnout isn’t just low, though. It’s falling. It tumbled from 47.8 percent in 2006 to 45.5 percent in 2010 before falling yet further to 41.9 percent in 2014.