As he's packed his proposed Cabinet with wealthy white men, President-elect Donald Trump has been criticized for assembling an administration that doesn't look like America, much less the "forgotten men and women" on whose behalf he claimed to have campaigned.
Next week, Washington, D.C.’s municipal government will vote on new legislation that, if enacted, would guarantee people working in the District up to 11 weeks of paid leave to care for a new baby or child. But this is just the latest in a string of state and local governments taking action to address the needs of working parents and their families.[...]
In a new report, “Asset Value of Whiteness,” Demos and the Institute on Assets and Social Policy take a deep dive into the intrinsic link between racism and capitalism; specifically, how whiteness infests the so-called American dream and renders it inaccessible to anyone who doesn’t meet the pre-selected criteria.
A new report out this morning called The Asset Value of Whiteness: Understanding the Racial Wealth Gappurports to shatter traditional explanations for the lack of financial progress in African American and Latinx households as compared to white ones in the U.S.
With the court split 4-4 on this and other issues, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Mr. Gorsuch’s record suggests he’s not the person to shift the tide toward building a democracy in which the size of our wallets doesn’t determine the strength of our voices. Senators must press for clear answers.
More than 90 percent of voters (including 91 percent of Trump voters) say that it is important for Trump to nominate a Supreme Court justice open to limiting big money in politics.
Trumpcare is dead. President Donald Trump is humiliated and so is House Speaker Paul Ryan. The Democrats can hardly believe their luck: The Republicans have hobbled their own agenda, while Obamacare, aka the Affordable Care Act, lives to fight another day. But unlike the law’s previous brushes with death—most notably its bruising encounters with the Supreme Court in 2012 and 2015—this latest example of its resilience represents a turning point, if Democrats choose to seize the opportunity.
To win over and mobilize the public, social justice advocates must articulate what we’re for, not just what we’re against. The American people deserve better than what’s currently on offer from team Trump, but for many, the status quo also falls short. If progressives are to fulfill one of our core principles—the use of public policy to improve the lives of those left out or underserved by the market economy—we need a simple, plausible plan that excites people. Two key components of that plan are Medicare for All and a guaranteed jobs program. [...]
"You are in a Catch-22," said Emmanuel Caicedo, a senior campaign strategist with Demos, one member of a coalition of 79 labor and civil rights organizations that formed the NYC Coalition to Stop Credit Checks in Employment.
"You can't pay your bills and so your credit is bad. And then you can't get a job to pay your bills because of your credit."
The rationale behind the ban is simple: it’s unfair and useless to use a person’s credit history, which is often inaccurate or misleading, when assessing their job qualifications.
Federal contracting with private vendors supports about two million low-wage private sector jobs, according to Demos, a national research institute, in their study, "Underwriting Bad Jobs." That is "more than the number of low wage workers at Walmart and McDonald's combined."
When discussing race, the conservative argument is best expressed by the famous words of Chief Justice John Roberts: "The best way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." Translation: America has done bad things in its history, but those bad things are gone now, so we should move past those horrors and look forward.
While income is distributed unequally in the country, what few people know is how much more unequally wealth, financial assets and inheritances are distributed.
At the individual level, racial differences have been observed when it comes to accumulating wealth. A study recently published by the public policy organization Demos called “Racial Wealth Gap” found that the wealth gap between Blacks and Whites has grown since the Great Recession. Specifically, it found that White households reported to have 17 times the wealth of Black households.
