If Build Back Better is passed, how do we ensure that everyone gets their fair share? How do we follow the money from the legislation? L. Joy brings Taifa Smith Butler to the front of the class to give us the action items we need to make sure our communities get the most out of it.
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.”
Since this country’s founding, Black and brown women have been America’s safety net. Both at home and abroad, our underpaid and unpaid labor are the building blocks that allow America to thrive.
"Unions are what sent my cousins to college, they're what helped us go on vacation, they're what made sure that when there were hard times my family still had jobs."
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.
Rather than try to dismantle one of the few tools we have to keep this problem from getting worse, this administration should take a more nuanced and comprehensive approach toward making our campuses more reflective of our society, particularly for the most diverse generation of students ever.
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.
A 2013 survey by Demos, a public policy organization that combats inequality, showed that 10 percent of respondents who were unemployed had been informed that they would not be hired because of some facet of their credit history. The same survey indicated that 1 out of every 7 job applicants with “blemished credit histories” had been told they were not hired because of their credit history. [...]
Last year, Americans took over 10 billion trips on public transportation. These were trips to work, to school, to stores, to health care, to places of worship, and elsewhere. For millions of Americans, their quality of life rests on the quality of public transit.
[A]ccording to our in-depth analysis of data from Demos and NCES, black and Hispanic students are paying more when it comes to student loans than white students. [...]
Instead of policies and agency practices that divide us by doubling down on the grave inequality created by historic and current discrimination, we should advance policies that repair these rifts and bring us together.
Despite major gains with the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the United States remains a global outlier when it comes to delivering affordable health care for its people.