The North Carolina legislature has had a remarkable session. In fact, the amount they have been able to accomplish is almost jaw-dropping—not because it was particularly productive but because it was so bold and unabashed it its attack on low and middle income families and basic elements of democracy. Among the legislative lowlights:
Jeffrey Toobin is up with a piece today, “Another Citizens United – But Worse,” about the Supreme Court’s next money in politics case. In McCutcheon v. FEC, slated for oral argument in October, appellants challenge contribution limits on the total amount of money one individual can transfer in direct contributions.
Democracy North Carolina put together a one-page report that summarizes HB-589, the bill the General Assembly passed in late July despite the mass demonstrations outside the capitol that came to be known as Moral Mondays.
When politics is dominated by the wealthy, the interests of the wealthy are advanced while the interests of lower income and working families are ignored.
Imagine Michael Bloomberg being stopped on the street by police and ordered in contemptuous tones to spread his arms and legs wide and lean over the hood of a car so he could be patted down.
New York City’s billionaire mayor would be outraged, to say the least, and so would his constituents. But such humiliating treatment by the police has been a daily reality for staggering numbers of young black and Latino New Yorkers whose only crime has been waking up each morning in the wrong colored skin.
With today's big higher ed speech, it's becoming clearer what President Obama's most important legacy may be: He could be the guy who finally stopped runaways costs for two of life's biggest necessities: healthcare and higher education.
This would be a big deal, because -- quite apart from issues of access and fairness -- the United States is putting itself at a global disadvantage by squandering so many resources on grossly overpriced services in both sectors.
“More than half of education and related expenses at public universities is now paid for through tuition, up from about 35 percent in 2001,” wrote study author Robert Hiltonsmith, Demos’ senior policy analyst.
In essence, public universities are no longer public, he said: They have become de facto “subsidized private institutions.”
Local social service agencies are not giving poor residents adequate opportunities to file and update voter registrations as required by federal law, a letter sent by a group of voting rights advocates warned the North Carolina State Board of Elections and Department of Health and Human Services.
Executives with Project Vote, Demos, Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the Southern Coalition for Social Justice were the lead authors of the letter, which is potentially the precursor to a lawsuit if North Carolina officials don't a
After the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, many pointed at the gap between the black population and their overwhelmingly white elected officials as a symptom of the country’s problem with race.
Demos, the New York-based group, began monitoring North Carolina about a decade ago because it spotted a drop-off in public assistance registrations. Gary Bartlett, the State Board of Elections director at the time, was eager to attract more voters, said Stuart Naifeh, an attorney with Demos.
“He was as dismayed as we were about the low rates,” Naifeh said. “He wanted to work with us to improve that.”
The nation’s yawning wealth gap is a major reason why minority students end up borrowing more for college. Structural racism has created disparities in home ownership rates, income and other wealth-building vehicles, providing minority borrowers with fewer resources to tap to pay for college, on average.
In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson vowed that no student wishing to attend college would "be turned away because his family is poor."
Half a century later, a shift in the way college is funded and the declining fortunes of minorities and poor families since the recession have created a college-debt system that the left-leaning think tank Demos calls "deeply biased along class and racial lines."
Because college is increasingly financed by debt taken on by students, it's creating a system that's impacting differen
Most students go into debt to pay for college. And while no one wants to be in the red, a new report from left-leaning think tank Demos argues that the increasingly debt-financed higher education system in the United States is especially harmful to low-income, black and Latino kids.
Student debt can weigh you down long into adulthood, and might make you less likely to ever be able to retire.
That's according to a new analysis from Demos, a progressive think tank.
This chart shows the clear benefit of getting a college degree. Households with some college but no degree are unlikely to own a home, while homeownership is the norm for households headed by someone who finished college.
A separate report this week by the left-leaning think tank Demos suggests that black students may also be disproportionately impacted by such policies.
The fact that student debt continues to soar is troubling enough. Now there is clear evidence that it also deepens the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
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The debt-free college initiative is based on a plan sketched out by liberal think tank Demos. It calls for the federal government to award grants to states that increase spending on higher education and increase need-based grant aid.
