* This essay is adapted from a lecture delivered on the occasion of the award of the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa to Bina Agarwal at the Lustrum Ceremony of the 55th Anniversary of the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, The Netherlands, October 18, 2007.
INTRODUCTION: GOING DEEPER THAN STRATEGIC COMMUNICATION
A popular recent meme on liberal social networks and left-leaning blogs summarizes ideological differences as follows:
While the partisan message is clear (only with liberalism's compassionate box-stacking does everyone get to watch baseball), conservative and libertarian critics of liberal equality also helped spread the image, mocking the inherent unfairness of giving some peo
INTRODUCTION
In the three decades after the Second World War, low- and middle-income households enjoyed income gains that grew in tandem with rising GDP levels and actually outpaced the gains enjoyed by the richest households. In short, if you wanted to report how “the U.S. economy was doing” or “how the U.S. economy was working for the vast majority,” you could just recite overall income growth rates.
Voting is the bedrock of our democracy. In a government of, by and for the people, casting a ballot is the fundamental means through which we all have a say in the political decisions that affect our lives. Yet today, without substantial interventions, the freedom to vote is at great risk.
Summary
Priorities USA is in the midst of a research project analyzing “swing voters” and “turnout voters” in the 2016 election in order to glean lessons that can be applied to strengthen Democrats in elections in 2018, 2020 and beyond. The initial analysis, conducted via polling and focus groups, has now continued with an examination of the impact of voter identification laws.
The United States has long granted trade preferences to developing countries that meet various criteria. These criteria, which are stipulated by the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP), have changed with time — reflecting U.S. economic and foreign policy priorities.
While the criteria include non-support for terrorism, enforcement of intellectual property rights, and respect for internationally recognized worker rights, the GSP does not include an environmental provision.
For far too long, brokers have been selling their older clients complex investments known as structured products. These products are so risky, and so costly in fees, that some of them are almost sure money losers. They entered retirement portfolios like Trojan horses, and then destroyed people’s life savings. Yet the financial meltdown of 2008 has not chastened Wall Street. Brokers and banks continue to sell these high-risk investments to people who can’t afford major losses.
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.
On March 29th, 2011 Public Works hosted a webinar on ways to take advantage of tax season as an opportunity to communicate a different story about the role of taxes in our country. While it focuses on Tax Freedom Day, it includes universal examples for any situation. This guide provides strategies for creating a better conversation about taxes. It examines the most common anti-tax narratives, offer lessons on how to respond to hypothetical questions, and include tips on avoiding common communication pitfalls.
Americans are famously concerned about values and personal morality. The United States ranks among the most religious of all the advanced industrialized democracies, and it has frequently experienced eras of intense moral introspection. The past several decades have been such a period, with heated debates over issues like abortion, drugs, divorce, homosexuality, and prayer in schools. Today, opinion polls show considerable public concern about the moral state of the country.
The link between corporate practices and the economic security of Americans has become a major focus of public debate over the past several years. The off-shoring of new kinds of jobs has garnered the most attention, but cutbacks in employee health benefits and the under funding of pension plans has also drawn scrutiny at a time when corporate profits have been robust and executive mismanagement has been widespread.
Economic security for seniors was built on the three-legged stool of retirement (Social Security, pensions, and savings) at the core of the social contract that rewards a lifetime of productivity. Seniors’ economic security, however, is being challenged by two simultaneously occurring trends: a weakening of the three legs of retirement security income and dramatically increasing expenses, such as for healthcare and housing.
Hundreds of thousands of families lost their homes because of loans that were often not fully explained or under¬stood. Beyond the Mortgage Meltdown distills the origins and nature of the crisis in the housing market. Senior Fellow James Lardner highlights the complicity of regulators and lawmakers in the genesis of the mortgage epidemic, and warns that bolder steps will be needed to stem the rate of foreclosures along with its broader economic impact to protect both markets and consumers against future catastrophe.
Part of a Demos series of reports on deregulation showing that often the most significant impact is on the quality and reliability of work — in this case, on port trucking.
Since the Spring of 2007 and continuing into the Summer of 2009, Public Works: The Demos Center for the Public Sector and the Topos Partnership have collaborated on a Ford Foundation-funded effort to create a new public conversation on the role of government in the economy. This effort has included a wide range of qualitative and quantitative research efforts, spanned a period of dramatic change in the national economic landscape, and built on earlier research conducted by Topos principals concerning the public's view of government and public understandings of low wage work.
Paving the Way is part of a larger effort undertaken by the Topos Partnership and Public Works to create more constructive public dialog about public policy and economic outcomes. Promoting Broad Prosperity contains the complete findings and recommendations from this body of research.
Taxes support the government services that undergird the quality of life Americans enjoy. As communicators, we must promote this unique and foundational role that taxes play. We can do this by explicitly communicating the relationship between the purpose of taxes and the well-being Americans appreciate. We need to help people see taxes as a means to an end, a necessary part of how we achieve shared goals. This document helps achieve this by providing sample language and a checklist for communicating about taxes.
