Cellphone video captured by ordinary citizens has given us visuals of several incidents that have gone viral while inducing national discussions in the process. Most notably, the heavily scrutinized Walter Scott case in North Charleston, S.C., in 2015. The unarmed Scott was fleeing (more like jogging) on foot when police officer Michael Slager shot him in the back.
With rising tuition costs outpacing inflation and wage growth, many students are struggling to afford college. In fact, about 44 million Americans owe over $1.48 trillion in student loan debt.
Causten E. Rodriguez-Wollerman, Director of Partnerships at Demos, joined us this week to discuss this promising research and how to talk race and class in the Trump era.
Kavanaugh’s track record on democracy raises serious concerns,” said Chiraag Bains, director of legal strategies for public policy organization Demos. “A Justice Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court could set us back when it comes to voting rights.” [...]
But the poll released this week suggests the debate is going on separately from how Americans experience student debt, said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank. And indeed, there are many reasons why voters may be feeling anxious over student debt.
Heather McGhee is distinguished senior fellow with Demos, a New York based public policy think tank, and an expert on race and inequality. She joins Detroit Today with Stephen Henderson to give her thoughts on what we’ve learned — and what we haven’t learned — in the past year.
Kavanaugh has been on the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Columbia, a frequent destination for cases involving the Federal Election Commission. His decisions have effectively pulled the campaign finance system rightward, letting in more money with less regulation. He's been roughly in sync with Anthony Kennedy, the justice he once clerked for and now might succeed.
But progressives are adamant that the only way to win in November and beyond is to be about more than economics, and that the right message—the one that will appeal to progressive whites, as well as turning out more people of color to the polls—invokes both race and class equally. Two Netroots trainings on developing a “Race-Class Narrative” were completely filled this weekend, with activists and organizers participating in mock-canvassing sessions in which they practiced delivering lines that contained both racial and economic messages.
Union groups and other campaigners see such moves as an attack on their power to secure higher wages for workers. “[This is] an often low-paid and vulnerable workforce of predominantly women of color who do critical work helping seniors and people with disabilities with daily tasks,” said Amy Traub, the associate director of policy and research for Demos, a public policy organization that has published research on federal government wages. “These rules slash at workers’ ability to join together to improve their jobs”.
Stuart Naifeh, a lawyer with the think tank Demos, which is representing Rivera and five nonprofit groups that work to mobilize Spanish-speaking voters, said they chose the 32 counties using census data to identify places where there were high concentrations of Puerto Ricans and people who aren’t proficient in English.
A lawsuit filed Thursday claims that Puerto Ricans living in Florida who have limited English proficiency will be prevented from voting because, according to a press release by the advocacy group Demos, “elections in many parts of the state are conducted only in English.” The suit alleges that 32 Florida counties are not planning to provide ballots in Spanish.
As the November midterm elections approach, several civic engagement groups filed a suit, on Thursday, against the Florida Secretary of State and 32 Florida counties for what they say is a violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, requiring bilingual voting materials and assistance be provided to Puerto Ricans. [...]
Several policy organizations have urged that institutions be held more accountable for the success of their students who get Pell Grants. [...]
Many who do enroll end up worse off than they started out, struggling to repay loans they took out to pay for educations they never finished; Pell recipients are nearly twice as likely as other students to borrow, the public-policy organization Demos says.
President Trump's nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court could have broad implications for civil and human rights at home and abroad. From the use of wartime powers like torture, to the regulation of business, to gender and racial equity, the lives of many can be decided by the Supreme Court. Yesterday, Kavanaugh and the Senate Judiciary Committee gave opening statements amid protests from Democrats, who believe President Trump is deliberately withholding access to vital documents.
[I]n Demos’ analysis of the case, the public policy organization focusing on issues of political equity, highlights that Kavanaugh, in joining this opinion, appears to question the idea of disparate impact, which maintains that a facially neutral policy can still have an adverse impact on a protected class.
The White House also withheld over 100,000 pages of information linked to the judicial nominee. That, said Chiraag Bains, the director of legal strategies at the think-tank Demos, is “something that’s never happened before.” About 42,000 pages of White House documents were released just hours before the questioning started.
