We
at Roosevelt are mourning the continued assault on Black lives, from
COVID-19, police brutality, and beyond. We stand in solidarity with
you.
How Unemployment Insurance
Supports Economic Freedom
The CARES Act’s expansion of the
unemployment insurance system—though flawed—has been vital for the
more than 40
million workers
who’ve lost their jobs in the last 10 weeks. Extending that expansion
before it expires in July is both an urgent moral imperative and a
first step in reimagining an unjust system, as Roosevelt Director of
Progressive Thought Mike Konczal writes for The Nation: “If it continues to be extended, more
people will understand that it could and should be expanded even
further, especially to those workers whom our social insurance system
doesn’t cover well. Finding a way to provide economic
security to our fractured labor force is one of the central goals of
our time. Unemployment
insurance will be part of that solution, and that’s why it is worth
fighting for.” Read
more.
- Another angle:
“What I would really like to see is publically funded jobs,
jobs that could be paid for by the federal government but administered
locally,” Roosevelt President & CEO Felicia Wong tells
Marketplace. “Let's put the people who need work together
with the jobs that need to be done.” Listen
here.
-
Protecting workers and
consumers: Next Monday at 8pm, a digital roundtable led by
the Center for Popular Democracy and Demand Justice—and featuring
Roosevelt Director of Governance Studies Todd Tucker—will analyze
what’s at stake in the coming Supreme Court battle over the Consumer
Financial Protection Bureau. Sign
up here. And on June 4 at 12 noon ET, Greenlight
Bookstore will host Wong and Roosevelt Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz
for a Zoom conversation about solutions to the COVID-19 economic
crisis, our government’s insufficient responses thus far, and
Stiglitz’s latest book, People,
Power, and Profits. Register
now.
The Glaring Holes of
Congress’s Response
In a Q&A
with The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner, Roosevelt Managing Director of Corporate
Power Bharat Ramamurti explains how the government’s crisis response
has favored larger businesses and what Congress can do now to help
struggling workers. As Ramamurti writes for the blog, agencies
implementing the CARES Act can and should be ensuring that relief for
big businesses carries the same conditions as for small
businesses—including employee retention requirements. “If the
government’s goal is to minimize layoffs and stabilize the economy,
its aid to bigger companies should come with the kind of inducements
to help workers it included in the aid it provided to smaller
companies,” he writes. “The Treasury and the Fed have the discretion
under the CARES Act to make this change. If they don’t
make these reforms, they should have to explain why we should trust
big businesses more than small businesses to do right by their
workers.”
Read
on.
- The hidden rules of race:
This week, Michelle
Holder (assistant professor of economics at John
Jay College, City University of New York) appeared
on CNN to discuss the unique challenges facing
minority-owned businesses during the COVID crisis.
The Case for Student Debt Cancellation and Free
College
“As long as student debt is serving as
a drag on our economy, everyone is paying for it, and the country can
no longer afford not to act,” Roosevelt education expert Suzanne Kahn
argues in a Wall Street
Journal
point-counterpoint. But “debt cancellation alone isn’t enough to
ensure this crisis won’t repeat itself. To bring down student-debt
levels permanently, we need to pair a one-time cancellation with free,
public higher education.” Read
more.
The Crisis Is Making Racial Inequality
Worse
As Roosevelt Senior Fellow Sandy
Darity and folklorist Kirsten Mullen tell
NPR’s Planet Money, COVID-19’s
disproportionate impact on Black communities only strengthens the
argument for reparations. Next week, Darity and Mullen will release a
new Roosevelt report that expands on their new book (From
Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First
Century); discusses global and domestic
precedents for reparation programs; including for 9/11 and Sandy Hook
victims; and offers revisions for HR 40, the 30-year-old reparations
committee bill.
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