The first platform committee meeting for the 2016 Democratic National Convention, featuring representatives from both campaigns as well as DNC neutrals, took place on Wednesday. Their deliberations will likely feature tough negotiations on a range of issues — a $15 minimum wage, fracking, the legitimacy of giant banks — that were points of contention during the campaigning, helping clarify the political and ideological shift that has taken place in the party since the mid-1990s when Robert Rubin was its intellectual lodestar.
Latinos have various national origins and ancestries, as well as generational, citizenship, and political differences. Even within our diversity, Latino unity is on the rise thanks to the emergence of the Latino counterpublic.
The 2016 presidential election is dominated by big money – with close to half of all Super PAC money coming from just 50 donors. When wealthy, white donors set the agenda each election season, whose voices are left unheard?
The Brennan Center for Justice, Demos and The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights invite you to engage in a thought-provoking and timely discussion about how the outsized influence of big money in politics may be a 21st Century civil rights issue and what we can do about it.
Differences of opinion are certainly important, but at some point the question of how inclusive the dominant society must be to the concerns of different people will have to move beyond the realm of personal preference.
The University of Pennsylvania Law Review Online has released a Special Issue on Campaign Finance exploring alternatives to the Supreme Court’s analysis in Buckley vs. Valeo, the foundational money in politics case decided 40 years ago this year.
Yesterday, a voting rights coalition asked the federal court to stop Ohio’s practice of removing properly registered voters from its voter registration list simply because they have not voted in recent elections.
Inequality is the common thread connecting every issue we work on at Demos, and challenging the public narrative about that inequality is essential to our work to solve it. This year, we’re proud to have an ally in that fight in the entire team behind the upcoming television documentary series America Divided, premiering this fall on EPIX.
Brenda Wright, an attorney with the public policy group Demos — which backed the lawsuit along with the Prison Policy Initiative — said the the litigation was aimed at getting localities to account for prisoners where it truly counts.
The ruling concluded that Cranston artificially inflated the population of Ward 6 by treating all inmates of the ACI as residents of the prison for redistricting purposes.
``I’m thrilled that our fight for equal representation has been successful,’’ said Karen Davidson, lead plaintiff, in a news release. ``Fairness in redistricting is a fundamental right and I’m glad the court has vindicated our claims.’’
Lagueux gave the city thirty days to redraw the districts.
“This is a big win for democracy,” said Adam Lioz of Demos, counsel for the plaintiffs. “Prison gerrymandering distorts representation and should no longer be tolerated. This decision should pave the way for other courts to address this long-standing problem.”
Plaintiffs argued that the "prison gerrymandering" improperly considered ACI prisoners as constituents of local elected officials when they are instead "residents of their pre-incarceration communities for virtually all legal purposes, including voting."
"I'm thrilled that our fight for equal representation has been successful," said lead plaintiff Karen Davidson, of Cranston. "Fairness in redistricting is a fundamental right and I'm glad that the court has vindicated our claims."
(BOSTON, Mass.)- Today, a broad coalition of consumer, civil rights, labor, and community organizations issued a letter strongly urging members of the U.S. House of Representatives to support of H.R. 5282, the Comprehensive Consumer Credit Reporting Reform Act of 2016, introduced today by Congresswoman Maxine Waters.
Now more than ever, our progressive movement needs real leaders who are equipped with the skills, fortitude, and vision to meet the political and economic challenges we face as a nation. For nearly four decades, the United States Student Association (USSA) has fostered this leadership.
Lobbyists are often frowned upon for doing the bidding of major corporations. A list of the organizations that spend the most on lobbying, maintained by the websiteOpenSecrets.org, is full of corporations like Boeing, General Electric, and AT&T, as well as associations like the National Association of Realtors.
If you’re feeling underpaid and overworked, you probably are: wages for typical U.S. workers still haven’t recovered from the Great Recession, even as working Americans continue to put in long hours. But a long-awaited update to the federal rules on overtime pay may finally bring relief.
Millions more workers could soon be making more money thanks to overtime changes the Obama administration announced today.
Starting December 1, the regulations being issued by the Labor Department would double the threshold under which salaried workers must be paid overtime, from to $47,476 from $23,660.
This rule is part of the patchwork of changes on the national, state, and even municipal level to raise wages for workers that have small businesses and large corporations figuring out how to balance the books, by either cutting workers or raising prices.
It’s not every day that low-paid workers — cleaners mopping the floors of Washington’s Union Station, vendors selling pretzels at the National Zoo, servers dishing out hot lunch at congressional cafeterias — speak out and win a voice in setting national policy. Yet three years ago, that’s exactly what began to happen.
In May 2013, workers employed by private companies under contract with the federal government came together to form Good Jobs Nation – and walked out on strike in the nation’s capital.
Today, the working class are most likely to work as caregivers, retail workers, cashiers, fast food workers, and janitors. How are the working class movements such as “Fight for $15” minimum wage shifting the political and economic landscape? Join the conversation, on the next Your Call, with Rose Aguilar, and you.
