Economic Justice

This memo provides guidance for discussing greater and more equitable job creation with policymakers, media, and persuadable members of the public.

This toolkit represents the best thinking about how to use the Opportunity Frame from the communications professionals at the SPIN Project, the leaders of The Opportunity Agenda, other communications professionals engaged in defining the Opportunity Frame, and grassroots leaders from across the country working on critically important issues. 

This memo offers guidance for using the 2009 State of Opportunity in America report, which examines various dimensions of opportunity, including health care, wealth and income, education, and incarceration. While expanding opportunity in America remains a goal of policymakers and advocates alike, this report finds that access to full and equal opportunity is still very much a mixed reality. Our recommendations to address this reality offer concrete ideas for moving us forward together.

This memo sets forth themes and ideas on talking about immigration during the current economic downturn.

These talking points offer communications advice to policymakers, scholars, advocates and others seeking to promote immigrant integration policies at the state or local level. 

Alan Jenkins, executive director of The Opportunity Agenda, appears on MSNBC to discuss the economy and our new report, The State of Opportunity in America.

This is the 2007 update to the State of Opportunity report.  There are two files, the full chart of indicators and a summary.

If the promise of opportunity is a core national commitment, it is essential to measure our success in fulfilling that commitment.  This report assesses the nation’s progress toward protecting and expanding opportunity for all Americans and encourages our policymakers, through bold leadership and innovative policies, to ensure the promise of o

Learn more: Gan Golan and Occupy Halloween On the News

Thirteen Things America Can Do to Stop Foreclosures and Fulfill the American Dream

Access to an affordable home under fair and sustainable terms is crucial to our economic security and central to the American Dream. But misconduct by banks and lenders, inadequate rules and enforcement, and record unemployment rates are robbing millions of Americans of their homes and security while ravaging whole communities and holding back our national recovery.

Economic Opportunity, Human Rights, and the Role of Government

By: Jill Mizell

July 27, 2011

Public Support for Policies for Equal Recovery and Opportunity

Looking at the road ahead, Public Opinion Monthly reviewed public support for policies, which promote equal opportunity for more communities in our society.

By Eleni Delimpaltadaki

Alan Jenkins, Executive Director of The Opportunity Agenda, writes in The American Prospect on how continued racial barriers hold back our economy.

 A recent forum in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, provided an in-depth discussion into the level of concern in the United States about poverty and opportunity, particularly concerning children. Spotlight on Poverty also looked at whether or not these issues will be factors in the upcoming presidential election. Overall, people believe strongly that equal opportunity for children of all races is very important; that not all children currently have full access to opportunity; and that presidential candidates’ views on poverty are very important. But, many think that neither the candidates nor the media are discussing poverty enough.

Those who say they don’t know what the Occupy Wall Street protestors want fail to understand the nature of this quintessential 21^st century movement.  It is true that they have no policy manifesto.  They have not yet released a list of shared demands, although they are working toward doing so.  But when you listen to the participants tell their stories, when you read their signs and hear their songs, their shared desires for our nation clearly emerge.

 The President has shown a talent for slowly but surely moving public opinion in the right direction on crucial policy points, then inexplicably giving those points away to his political opponents for little or nothing in return. According to last month’s Gallup poll, for example, only 20% of Americans want Congress to reduce the deficit solely through spending cuts, while the overwhelming majority favor some mix of taxes and cuts, and an additional 7% support tax cuts alone. This was President Obama’s stated position, the one thing he said he would stand by, yet the deal he ultimately signed off on included zero revenue increases.

As the deadline nears for national default if Congress does not raise the debt ceiling, the two parties appear deadlocked over ending tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans, which Republicans oppose, and deep cuts to Social Security and Medicare, which Democrats reject.  In our current political environment, and with Tea Partiers and pending Republican primaries in the mix, it is conceivable that leaders may allow the country to default for the first time in our history, with catastrophic results.  But doing so would be Armageddon not only for our economy, but for conservatives i

Conservatives in Congress and their echo chamber have backed President Obama, and the American people, into a dangerous corner.  Private sector job creation is desperately needed for our national recovery and to begin rebuilding the economic security of our people.  

Yet for a mix of political and ideological reasons, conservatives are blocking two of the critical steps necessary to achieve that goal: federal investment in private sector job creation and increased tax contributions from the wealthiest and most privileged Americans.  Both are needed in order to get Americans back to work and grow the economy while beginning to reduce the deficit.

Last week, Hazel Dickens, who dedicated her life to using song to give voice to the voiceless, died at the age of 75.  Dickens’ voice was wholly her own, bearing all the traces of her hardscrabble mountain upbringing, and her passing is a great loss to American culture as well as the movement to expand to create full and equal opportunity.

On February 16, 2011, a group of economists, housing advocates, and civil-rights organizations met in Washington, D.C. to discuss the future and reform of government-sponsored enterprises, or GSEs.  The forum was hosted by the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) and partners; the National Fair Housing Alliance, The Opportunity Agenda, and the Center for Responsible Lending.

For those of us who can still even stomach it, the first Friday of the month—the usual day for the release of the previous month’s federal Employment Situation Summary, known informally as the jobs report—has become a fairly pathetic ritual, particularly for optimists.  We hope for some proof, any proof, that a real recovery is underway.  If jobs were shed across the board, but the unemployment rate trended lightly downward, we try to pretend that it wasn’t because still more people have pulled themselves out of the formal count by giving up looking for work entirely.  If private sector job growth and public sector job loss cancel each other out, we put on our market fundamentalist wishful thinking caps and talk about how private sector jobs are somehow more sustainable than their public sector equivalents.  And when modest job growth does occur, even when it’s below even the basic replacement rate needed to accommodate a growing workforce, well, that’s when we bring out the champagne.

A coalition of over 150 social justice and public interest groups has come together to call for job creation and investment in opportunity, including for the country's hardest hit communities. They'll launch their call in a march on Washington October 2, 2010. It's the right call at the right time.

At a time like this, even modest, and potentially temporary, declines in the unemployment rate deserve a round of applause.  Well, unless the decline in the unemployment rate only brings it back to where it was for the first three months of the year.  And unless the rate remains significantly higher for people who had been stranded furthest from opportunity even before the recession.  So, maybe a golf clap?

"As they say on my own Cape Cod, a rising tide lifts all the boats."
-John F. Kennedy

"Rising tides don't lift all boats, particularly those stuck at the bottom."
-Reverend Jesse Jackson

President Kennedy made that declaration in 1963. Since then income inequality in the United States has greatly increased. As reported by The Economist:

With or without government intervention? Public Opinion and Facts
Following a pro-longed debate over health care reform, a new legislative battle over financial regulation is under the way. What remains consistent in the public discourse and in Washington is the bone of contention: the role of government.

But what is it that we really argue about it? It could be many things such as the wellbeing of the people, the financial health of the country or America's leading role in world politics. In the bigger picture, a lot of what we are arguing and fighting for are embodied in the idea of the American Dream, that "dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement" (James Truslow Adams).

A new national poll released Friday shows that Americans are feeling more optimistic about the economy than they were in January 2010.  While this is good news, there is still work to be done.

After a recent breakup, a friend of mine had an awkward conversation with her new ex. It began with this difficult question – “I know you’ve got a new man, but is he a good man?”

Some things are just hard to answer.  So when I read in the New York Times this Friday that the job market was brightening, I knew better than to question the statement.  Out loud, at least.

In her blog today, Arianna Huffington asks if CBS’s new reality offering, Undercover Boss, is the most subversive show on television. It’s a provocative question, as most of us would like to think that a reality show existed that could turn the genre on its head.

While it is a deeply-held American belief that we’re all in this together, there has long been a truism that when the economy gets a cold, the poor get pneumonia. It’s a glib way of noting that any downturn in the economy has a disparate impact on those least prepared to handle it.

With an African-American President leading our country, do we still need to think about and create solutions for historic barriers to opportunity? The answer? Absolutely.

President Obama faced a remarkable political challenge in his recent State of the Union.  Beset on all sides—by populists on the left and right who are highly suspicious of him and all of institutional Washington, by an economy that can produce GDP growth but not jobs, by an increasing consensus that he has failed to connect his legislative priorities to core values since the election—he succeeded in, if nothing else, reminding us of the energy and passion that helped him build a network of committed volunteers, grassroots campaign staff, and small dollar donors.  In the speech he offered a litany of new financial policy prescriptions, including one—rolling $30 billion of TARP funds that big banks have already repaid into smaller, local banks—that has not garnered many headlines, but which represents an affirmation of the critical role that our communities play in our economic vibrancy.  

Although official unemployment in New York City is 10.1 percent, a closer look reveals an underlying complexity to the story. Rates of unemployment vary greatly across the city.

The University of California's Regents recently announced plans to raise undergraduate fees, the functional equivalent of tuition, an eye-popping 32% for the upcoming school year.  While desperate times do call for desperate measures—and these are indeed desperate times for California’s budget—erecting economic obstacles to educational achievement will only hurt the state in the long-run.  California became a leader in high-tech industries like software and semi-conductors by fostering the type of innovation that only comes from providing economic opportunity for all, and it can doom itself to long-term economic obsolescence by making higher education a luxury good.

The economic stimulus package has tackled some of the most pressing job-related issues facing our communities.  However, with national unemployment at over 10% for the first time since the early 1980s, we have to make sure recovery monies are spent in communities who need help the most. We have a better chance of achieving success in these areas if we come together to ensure that our most vulnerable communities, including communities of color, immigrants, and the poor, can participate in and contribute to our economic growth.

with Jill Mizell

Americans are still pessimistic about employment and the economy, according to several recent polls. A majority agree that young people will not achieve the same standard of living as the previous generation or that it is more likely that families will suffer “economic reversals” in the next 5 to 10 years. Support for the stimulus bill has dropped and opinion is now deadlocked on the bill, though some aspects, such as spending on infrastructure and public works, remain popular among a majority. A majority of Americans think that some of the recent federal measures should be lasting, while fewer Americans – although still a majority – feel that President Obama's policies will help in these tough economic times.

 As the American economy claws its way back from the edge of a cliff, Michigan serves as a powerful example of just how bad things are in some places, and, indeed, how bad they could get for the rest of the country.  The state continues to have the highest unemployment of any state, and, while the auto bailouts appear to have prevented the wholesale collapse of the industry, there is no question that American automakers will cease to exist if they do not thoroughly reform themselves, which would send the state’s unemployment rate still higher.   And yet, in Flint, a city at the center of the storm, where more than a third of residents live in poverty, citizens refuse to give up on their community.

As Obama’s first 100 days draw to a close, new research shows that addressing today’s economic crisis will require reinvesting in a bedrock American principle: Opportunity. The State of Opportunity, released last week by The Opportunity Agenda, measures our nation’s progress in ensuring that all Americans, and our nation as a whole, have a fair chance to achieve their full potential. The results are sobering.

This week President Obama promoted his much-needed economic recovery package in a prime-time news conference and a trip to economically depressed Elkhart, Indiana, where the unemployment rate has topped 15%. Cities and towns like Elkhart are bellwethers for where the nation as a whole could be headed without swift and bold governmental action.

Every year, I watch the holiday screening of the 1946 film “It’s a Wonderful Life,” and marvel at how relevant the film remains. That was true in spades this year.