In 2019, progressive organizations, funders, academics, artists, and more came together to strategize about what must be done to face and address the crises undermining our democracy.
A Hawaii Partnership Bank will generate new revenue for Hawaii, save local governments money, and make us less dependent on big offshore banks that are dramatically reshaping life for families and businesses in Hawaii.
"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.
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.
The Black Census Project is intended to “give us a better sense of who black people are, where we are, and what we hope and dream for,” says Alicia Garza who also helped start the Black Lives Matter movement.