Angela joins Moms Rising CEO Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner to talk worker power and a new generation of unions, and why a multiracial democracy is essential for a thriving economy.
“The government has not asked questions of the banks for this latest bailout—protecting the priorities of banks and shareholders. But for the rest of us, not so much.”
In 2016, a report from the progressive think tank Demosfound that most campaign dollars in local elections were coming from contributors who are white, male and high-income.
"I think Greta has been able to speak truth to power in a way that has resonated with a lot of young people who are frustrated, who have lived their whole lives seeing inaction on climate change."
Without the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, lenders preying on communities of color would continue to pull in windfall gains, while widening the racial wealth gap and undermining the precarious financial stability of vulnerable households.
From the day he launched his campaign with dire warnings about border-crossing “bad hombres,” Donald Trump has preyed on some Americans’ worst biases around immigration. Trump has since exhorted Congress to allocate tens of billions of dollars for a border wall, stepped up arrests of immigrants, separated Latino children from their parents, and pushed to expedite deportations. [...]
The Congressional Black Caucus budget should be implemented because it calls for racial equity in future infrastructure and investments; improving public transit infrastructure, noting that people of color are heavy users of it; and school infrastructure, saying that modernized buildings held reduce achievements gaps.
Even before the Equifax breach, the integrity of credit reports was murky at best. A Federal Trade Commission report found that as many as one in five consumers had a credit error from one of the top reporting agencies (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion). But the fundamental problem isn’t data integrity—it’s economic justice. According to a survey by the think tank Demos, declining credit was associated more with misfortunes and unforeseeable crises than with a lack of financial responsibility.
Another solution — though one that is often a struggle to achieve — is to unionize, which has worked before in industries like teaching, policing, and manufacturing. “If retail workers were able to organize strong unions across the country, there’s no reason retail jobs couldn’t be good jobs like manufacturing jobs,” Amy Traub, Associate Director for Policy and Research at public policy organizationDemos, tells Bustle.
With only the wealthy funding and communicating with the campaigns of elected officials, politicians are incentivized to make policy decisions that align with their donors’ interests, not those of their broader constituency. But the elite donor class holds views that don’t align with the general public’s, as a 2016 Demos study detailed.
Employees would likely contribute less to IRA accounts
If the proposal passes, there is a strong indication that U.S. workers will either shift their savings to Roth Individual Retirement Account (IRA) accounts, where contributions are taxed immediately or employees and employers will contribute less for retirement.
Studies have shown that policy most reflects the preferences of the most wealthy members of society and that those preferences do not reflect the greater public opinion on issues including the economy.
The increased economic anxiety among black and Hispanic workers is not surprising when considering the fact that working-class workers of color tend to be paid less on the job and, therefore, hold less wealth.
For several years, Demos and our partners have been working to fulfill our Constitution’s democratic promise by forging a new legal order that is open to money-in-politics reforms, and marshalling the factual and legal arguments that could help the Court move in this direction.