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A Representative and Accountable Government

Dēmos envisions a government that embeds public participation in its decision-making and centers the will and well-being of the people.   

Corporate and wealthy elites have a stronghold on government levers, creating policies that benefit only the few, often at the expense of the public.   

 

 

To

Demos Sends Letter to Senators Opposing Confirmation of John K. Bush to the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit & Damien Schiff to the Court of Federal Claims

Dear Senators: We the undersigned organizations write to oppose the confirmation of John K. Bush to the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and Damien Schiff to the Court of Federal Claims due to their troubling views on the issue of money in politics.
Testimony and Public Comment
Various Social Justice Organizations

Why Hollywood's Creative Class Is Going Broke. And Why It Matters

Times are tough for creative people in the entertainment industry -- even as big profits roll in for corporations like Viacom and Disney. It's a familiar story, only in this case its film editors, make-up artists, and musicians who are getting creamed.
Blog
David Callahan

Here's a Conservative With Some Good Ideas for Getting People Back to Work

The left and right will never agree on many economic questions -- like how government can best stimulate growth -- but when you get down in the weeds there are places for a real conversation. At least with a smart guy like Michael Strain, who's a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of a chapter on reducing unemployment in the new conservative manifesto, Room to Grow.

Blog
David Callahan

How Did Midterms Become So Bad for U.S. Democracy?

It was certainly a nice theory that the Founders had: make Congress more responsive to the people by putting members of the House up for re-election every two years. With so many state elected offices also up for the grabs, and the staggering of Senate terms, midterm elections became even more consequential over time than the Founder probably ever imagined. 

Blog
David Callahan

A Global Role At What Price?

President Obama's big speech at West Point today on America's role in the world is getting lots of attention from foreign policy wonks, but anyone interested in domestic policy should also be paying keen attention. Why? Because how the U.S.
Blog
David Callahan

What's the Best Way to Blunt Right-Wing Populism?

The conservative populist playbook has a timeless power, and two of its key strategies are especially potent: 1) Attack faceless government bureaucrats that are meddling in people's lives; and 2) Attack people who look different and are changing things.
Blog
David Callahan

The Smartest Conservatives in the Room? Not Quite

On Tuesday, Tea Party challengers received a drubbing by establishment GOP candidates. And today, a group of conservatives published a manifesto with practical ideas meant to woo the middle class entitled Room to Grow. I guess extremism in defense of liberty might be a vice after all. 

Blog
David Callahan

What's the Difference Between Universities and Corporations? It's Getting Hard to Say

We need a return to valuing equity in higher education.

Blog
David Callahan

Why Is Walmart Standing Down in the Minimum Wage Fight?

Here's a piece of good news in the fight to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour: Walmart's U.S. president, Bill Simon, said last week that the nation's largest employer, will not oppose such an increase. 

Blog
David Callahan

Will Today Mark a Turning Point in the Capital vs. Labor Story?

The owners of capital have had a great run over the past few decades. They've made a killing by exploiting an open global trading system, an abundance of cheap labor, and technological advances. Times have been so good that Forbes lists a record 1,645 billionaires worldwide, including 268 new ones in just the past year. 
 
Yet nothing lasts forever, and systems that favor the few over the many are especially vulnerable to disruption. It's always hard to say when the shift will come, or what will mark a turning point.
Blog
David Callahan

Why This Oil Billionaire Wants to Pay Higher Taxes

America's oil and natural gas boom may be bad news for the climate, but it should be good news for state treasuries.
Blog
David Callahan

Who's Tackling One of the Knottiest Challenges Facing U.S. Workers?

I've written a few times in recent months about the breakdown of traditional employment relationships. Organizations of all kinds—mainly in the private sector, but also universities and other nonprofits—have grown super savvy about outsourcing any number of functions they used to do in-house to contractors. And, no, I'm not talking about shipping jobs to China.
Blog
David Callahan

When It's Freedom vs. Fairness, Which Wins in America?

A central goal of progressive strategy should be to ensure that freedom and fairness are not pitted against each other. 

Blog
David Callahan

How an Egregious Tax Loophole Could Save This Billionaire $700 Million Next April

David Tepper topped the list of best paid hedge managers for last year, pulling in $3.5 billion. That's an astonishing amount of money for one person to make in a single year -- and is larger than the annual GDP of 35 countries.
Blog
David Callahan

Coming Next Thursday: A New Global Labor Movement?

Globalization has kept labor unions on the defensive for nearly forty years now. While workers are pretty much stuck where they live, corporations are able to move production around to find the lowest wages. But labor has gotten better over the years at exploiting a globalized world for its own aims, and we may see a big step forward on that front when fast-food workers stage their first-ever global strike on May 15 against multinational giants like McDonald's. 
 
It's true that globalization has put more cards in the hands of capital.
Blog
David Callahan

Who Is Really Able to Attack Inequality?

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley are two of the most admired progressives in politics right now. But there's a big difference between these leaders: One has lots of power and the other does not. O'Malley's power was vividly on display Monday when he signed a law that will raise his state's minimum wage in Maryland to $10.10 by 2018.
Blog
David Callahan

What Would Happen to Companies Like Target If They Paid $15 an Hour?

Henry Ford famously shocked the nation in 1914 when he announced that he was doubling the wages of Ford's workers to $5 an hour. Ford's logic was that better paid American workers would become bigger spending consumers -- not only buying more Model Ts, but more of everything. Which is pretty much what happened in the U.S. over the next 50 years as a new middle class sprang into being. 
 
So which corporate leader in a low-wage industry could we imagine stepping forward to be the Henry Ford of today?
Blog
David Callahan

Forget Everything You Know About U.S. Politics. It's All Going to be Different

Michael Lind has one of the bigger brains around, and you can always count on him to advance provocative and sweeping arguments. He doesn't disappoint with his new piece in The Breakthrough Journal, "The Coming Realignment." It's one of those big think articles where the thesis seems entirely obvious after you've heard it. 

Blog
David Callahan

Segregation May be the Hardest Part of Inequality To Solve

If you hang around the inequality debate long enough, wading through the many smart proposals to reduce the income gap, it all starts to seem kind of doable. We could make a real dent in inequality through a bunch of steps ranging from raising the minimum wage to more heavily taxing capitals gains to whacking tax subsidies to affluent Americans to making it easier to form unions to downsizing Wall Street's role in the economy to reducing the role of money in politics and so on. 

Blog
David Callahan