Today the average college grad leaves school with just over $24,000 in debt, an amount that eats up $276 every month if you stretch the payments out over ten years and it’s a government loan with a 6.8 percent interest rate. Of course, one out of five students also carries more costly private loans, where interest rates are in the double digits and fees add to the balance. This debt-for-diploma system is what counts as opportunity in America today.
One grievance of the protesters targeting Wall Street is that financial elites wield way too much power in our democracy. That complaint is hardly new, but the latest figures on money in politics tells a truly troubling story about the vast resources that Wall Street has put into shaping both the legislative process and elections.
The New York Times ran a front page article this morning titled "As Scorn for Vote Grows, Protests Surge around Globe." Nicholas Kulish writes that across the globe, from Spain and Greece to Israel and India, political protests are being motivated not just by rising economic inequality but by a growing feelin
A photo voter ID law signed by Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry is unnecessary, unfair, restrictive and intentionally discriminates against African-American and Latino voters, a coalition of civil rights groups will argue in a letter to the Justice Department on Wednesday.
Law that tries to exclude human judgment of right and wrong always veers towards unintended places - as with the Rockefeller drug laws, or "three strikes" laws that send petty criminals to jail for life.
The United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit issued a pair of decisions affirming campaign finance disclosure provisions in Maine and Rhode Island. I let out a sigh of relief when I read them.
Why is it important for civil rights and good government groups to to be granted status as intervenor defendants in a lawsuit about counting prisoners in redistricting?
Because the legislative commission charged with drawing the lines, LATFOR, hasn't exactly been vigorous in defending itself in a lawsuit filed about the issue, they say.
As currently drawn, five Massachusetts House districts would have too few residents to meet the Supreme Court's standard - if inmates are not counted as living there, according to Brenda Wright of Demos, a public interest group with a Boston office. She testified before the committee in Dorchester last month.
The mutual admiration between the two has been apparent for some time. Herbert has been a speaker at Demos and has also cited the think tank over his years as a New York Times columnist. He wrote in one that almost exclusively centered on Demos that the think tank has responded to right-wing zealotry with “admirable real-world scholarship, a highly respected fellows program to encourage new writers and thinkers and steadfast efforts to promote civic engagement. (It’s a big champion, among other things, of same-day voter registration.)”
Prison-based gerrymandering is the practice of counting incarcerated persons as “residents” of a prison when drawing legislative districts in order to give extra influence to the districts that contain the prisons. The U.S. Constitution requires that election districts be roughly equal in size, so that everyone is represented equally in the political process. But prison-based gerrymandering distorts our democracy by artificially inflating the population numbers — and thus, the political clout — of districts with prisons, while diluting the political power of all other voters.
Republicans cite the measures as protection against voter fraud, while Democrats and voting rights groups say the bills would disproportionately keep away young people and minorities, and say they are aimed at blocking ballot access for core Democratic voters.
In 2008, for example, Barack Obama relied on college students to bolster his base during the primaries. Under several proposals, an out-of-state student would no longer be able to use a school photo ID as proof of identity, but would have to make an effort to get state identification.
One report shows that nearly 12,000 voters were disqualified statewide from October 2008 to November 2010. Another shows that nearly 6,200 were disqualified from 2006 to 2010. The Election Division wasn't able to explain the discrepancy.
The sheer number of potential voters swept up by the law is another concern, said Brenda Wright, director of the Democracy Program at Demos, a nonpartisan organization that focuses on public policy research and advocacy.
Senate Republicans are suing the Department of Corrections as well as LAT-FOR, the task force on redistricting & reapportionment over a new law sponsored last year by Eric Schneiderman while he was still in the State Senate — the law changes where prisoners are counted. Today we will hear both sides of the argument beginning with Brenda Wright of Demos, a non partisan public policy research and advocacy organization… And then Senator James Seward, one of the people filing the law suit.
The suit is against LATFOR and DOCS. They will be defended by the state attorney general's office. AG Eric Schneiderman was a senator last year, and sponsored legislation to count prisoners at their former homes. Proponents of the law argue that prisoners should count in the communities they were a part of, not ones where they can't vote.
David Callahan, a senior fellow at the think tank Demos, contends the tax code should differentiate between charities and overtly partisan advocacy organizations. Now neither type of group must reveal the names of its supporters.
"It's unbelievable, probably half the states in the country have bills in play and more than a dozen are seriously in the pipeline," Tova Wang of the left-leaning think tank Demos told TPM in an interview. "It's really unprecedented in terms of geographic scope. I've never seen anything like it certainly since I've been working on voting rights issues that voter suppression bills would be introduced in so many places at the same time."
Redistricting too often succumbs to gerrymandering. Instead of the people choosing their elected officials, the elected officials choose their constituents.