Written testimony of Demos President K. Sabeel Rahman before the US House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law
At the Democratic National Convention, former First Lady Michelle Obama made a point that is relevant to both parties: If policymakers do not take bold and transformative action, trends can and will get worse.
Rather than cutting funds for public needs while allowing police budgets to swell, cities, states, and the federal government must shift funding to the real priorities of communities.
The ongoing devaluing of Black life that’s now on full display forces us to confront America’s racist origins and to uproot our systems of racial violence, economic subordination, and hoarding of political power.
COVID-19 is a threat to everyone, but the economic damage resulting from medically necessary quarantines and shelter-in-place orders is neither random nor equally distributed.
This pandemic is revealing the deeper inequities for Black and brown people that have always been present in our economy and democracy but that are often papered over in ordinary times.
The Disparate Impact standard is critical to continued and enhanced opportunity to access fair credit, housing, and homeownership. Demos strongly opposes efforts to undermine this longstanding enforcement tool.
Senator Elizabeth Warren just unveiled the first plan of the 2020 election cycle that comprehensively addresses both college affordability and student loan debt simultaneously.
Private credit reporting is failing for all of us who must rely on credit reports produced by for-profit companies to navigate financial transactions. For communities of color, credit scores evoke the decades of bank redlining and unequal access to credit whose impact persists to this day.
December 10, 2018 is the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In 1948, in the aftermath of the fall of the Nazi regime, the United States joined many countries in the world and signed the Declaration. Several of the rights listed in the document were already within the U.S. Constitution, but some were not. We have done particularly poorly in living up to the Declaration’s call for a right to an adequate standard of living, including food, housing, and medical care.
Demos strongly urges the Department of Homeland Security to withdraw the proposed rule to radically enlarge the list of criteria that will be used to decide whether an immigrant is likely to become a “public charge.”
November 1st is Latina Equal Pay Day, marking the date when the typical Latina woman’s wages since January 1, 2017 finally catch up to what the typical white man was paid in calendar year 2017.