New York, NY – Today, Heather McGhee, president of Demos, and Garry Civitello, a resident of Asheville, North Carolina, released the following statement on the premiere of the second season of Upstanders, a Starbucks original series. This season features the story of Heather and Garry’s friendship, which began after Garry called into C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” program, on which Heather was a guest.
“In our interconnected society, racism — both interpersonal and institutional — is the flaw in the machine that often stymies our democracy and our economy,” McGhee, who’s working on a book on this topic, said. “Racism and bias against full portions of the population color the policy responses of elected officials.” [...]
Some are heartened to see functioning-for-free college popping up in places like New York and elsewhere. Mark Huelsman senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank and the author of an influential white paper on free college, said he hopes they’ll serve as “laboratories” for policymakers to understand both the benefits and the limitations of different free college program designs.
Many Americans believe that we have achieved black-white racial economic equality, but the data continue to show that we have a long way to go. For centuries, we have had policies to help white families build wealth at the expense of black families.
Another solution — though one that is often a struggle to achieve — is to unionize, which has worked before in industries like teaching, policing, and manufacturing. “If retail workers were able to organize strong unions across the country, there’s no reason retail jobs couldn’t be good jobs like manufacturing jobs,” Amy Traub, Associate Director for Policy and Research at public policy organizationDemos, tells Bustle.
TRANSITIONS -- Arlene Corbin Lewis has joined the D.C. office of the public policy think tank, Demos, as the director of communications. She previously was at the Case Foundation where she was the VP for communications
Even before the Equifax breach, the integrity of credit reports was murky at best. A Federal Trade Commission report found that as many as one in five consumers had a credit error from one of the top reporting agencies (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion). But the fundamental problem isn’t data integrity—it’s economic justice. According to a survey by the think tank Demos, declining credit was associated more with misfortunes and unforeseeable crises than with a lack of financial responsibility.
New York, NY – In response to Trump’s new Muslim Ban, Demos Vice President of External Affairs Tori O'Neal-McElrath released the following statement:
"Donald Trump's new restriction on immigration from eight countries is a sham, and substantively a third Muslim Ban. The principal imperative of this ban - like its predecessors – is to discriminate against Muslims solely based on their religion.
"These consumer protections are important, yet they are far from sufficient to prevent credit checks from becoming a barrier to employment," said Amy Traub, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a public-policy think tank in New York City. "My research finds that poor credit is linked to economic stress. Weak credit is correlated with unemployment, lack of health coverage and the presence of children in a household.
For those who believe Black people are already equal with white people, any policy that seeks to address anti-Black discrimination looks like an attempt to give Blacks an advantage.
The need for books as a source of knowledge was on display in a conversation between Heather McGhee, president of liberal think tank Demos, and Chris Hayes, a Brooklyn native and cable news pundit on MSNBC. [...]
Dear Senator,
We the undersigned organizations write in strong support of The Equal Employment for All Act (S.1819), introduced by Senator Elizabeth Warren. The bill would eliminate an unfair and discriminatory barrier to economic mobility and security for many Americans by prohibiting the use of personal credit history in employment.
NEW YORK — Demos and American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court detailing how Ohio is violating the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) by targeting registered voters who fail to vote in a two-year period for eventual removal from the registration rolls — even if they have not moved and are still fully eligible to vote.
“If you’re a college and you’re offering a very low level of prospective debt to students, that means nothing if the people who overall have more unmet financial need, or are more likely to have to borrow, can’t get into your institution,” said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank.
Rankings can also subtly push colleges away from spending on financial aid for needy students and, instead, toward things rewarded by the rankings, like small faculty-to-student ratios, Huelsman said. [...]
The Congressional Black Caucus budget should be implemented because it calls for racial equity in future infrastructure and investments; improving public transit infrastructure, noting that people of color are heavy users of it; and school infrastructure, saying that modernized buildings held reduce achievements gaps.
