“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.
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."
"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.
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.
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.
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.