NYC Council Progressive Caucus Backs Keith Ellison for DNC Chair
NYC Council Progressive Caucus Backs Keith Ellison for DNC Chair
The City Council’s dominant Progressive Caucus—led by Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito—announced their endorsement today...
The City Council’s dominant Progressive Caucus—led by Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito—announced their endorsement today of Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison for chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
As Democrats look to recover from a devastating Election Day, Ellison is vying to lead the party against former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean and South Carolina chairman Jaime Harrison. Ellison, the first Muslim-American ever elected to the House of Representatives, has attracted the support of Sen. Charles Schumer and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, whom the congressman backed for the presidency in defiance of most party leaders.
Now the Progressive Caucus, whose 19 members mostly though not unanimously favored Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary, has added its backing to the Midwestern lawmaker’s bid.
“The members of the Progressive Caucus Alliance are proud to add our voices to those in support of Keith Ellison for Chair of the Democratic National Committee,” the group said in a press release today. “Congressman Ellison has been a true progressive champion in Congress, and has demonstrated the grit and tenacity that we’ll need for the tough fights ahead.”
Dean, who headed the DNC from 2005 to 2009, has asserted that the organization needs a chair who can attend to party business full-time. The Democrats have suffered severe setbacks over the past eight years under chairs who held elected office, most recently the controversial Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.
The former Green Mountain State governor and 2004 presidential candidate has highlighted the success of his “50-state strategy” in yielding the first Democratic majority in Congress in 22 years in 2006.
More important for the Council’s Progressive Caucus, however, are Ellison’s two turns as keynote speaker at “Local Progress” gatherings of low-level left-leaning officials. This, the caucus asserted, showed an emphasis on building a party bench at the most basic levels of government.
“As municipal legislators, we are especially enthusiastic about his emphasis on progressive politics at the local level,” their statement said. “Congressman Ellison recognizes that progressive politics matter at the most local of levels: to families seeking a job that pays the bills, to kids from low-income families hoping to go to college, and to parents worried about whether their kids of color will be treated fairly by the criminal justice system. He knows the difference it makes to unite action at the local, state and federal levels, and why it is important to build strength among City Council members and other local elected officials.”
Ellison’s bid also comes as many Democrats, including Schumer, have argued the party needs to increase outreach to blue collar white voters in depressed industrial areas. But the Progressive Caucus insisted the “incredibly divisive national atmosphere” President-elect Donald Trump’s incendiary anti-immigrant rhetoric has created demands party leadership that will stick up for minorities.
“We need a leader who will stand firm against hatred, bias, discrimination, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia,” the Council members’ release said. “The members of the Progressive Caucus Alliance know that Congressman Ellison will be that type of leader, and we enthusiastically support his bid for Chair of the DNC.”
“We are enthusiastic that he will be [the] first Muslim-American DNC Chair,” it added.
Disclosure: Donald Trump is the father-in-law of Jared Kushner, the publisher of Observer Media.
By Will Bredderman
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The Activists Who Helped Shut Down Trump’s CEO Councils
The Activists Who Helped Shut Down Trump’s CEO Councils
The CEOs who made up two White House advisory councils have fled like rats on a sinking ship. Their exodus — a dramatic...
The CEOs who made up two White House advisory councils have fled like rats on a sinking ship. Their exodus — a dramatic rebuke of Donald Trump — came within 48 hours of the incendiary August 15 press conference where the president praised some of the participants of last week’s white supremacist rampage in Charlottesville, Virginia.
But many of the CEOs on these councils had been under heavy pressure to disavow Trump’s agenda of hate and racism even before Charlottesville. That pressure came from grass-roots activists.
The Center for Popular Democracy, Make the Road New York, New York Communities for Change and several other immigrant and worker advocates had led that activist campaign, targeting the leaders of nine major corporations affiliated with the Trump administration. The campaign, working through a website called Corporate Backers of Hate, detailed the connections between the nine companies and the Trump administration and encouraged people to send emails to both the CEOs involved and members of their corporate boards.
Read the full article here.
Seattle Unanimously Passes an 'Amazon Tax' to Fund Affordable Housing
Seattle Unanimously Passes an 'Amazon Tax' to Fund Affordable Housing
Nearly 40 elected city officials from all corners of the U.S., including from metros bracing for Amazon HQ2 like Boston...
Nearly 40 elected city officials from all corners of the U.S., including from metros bracing for Amazon HQ2 like Boston, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, and Washington, D.C., signed an open letter on Monday urging Seattle City Council to stay the course and criticizing Amazon’s tactics during the head tax debate.” “This is particularly concerning to us given Amazon’s approach to the competition for HQ2, in which the company has promoted a bidding war of jurisdictions competing with each other to offer greater incentive packages,” the letter read. “If Amazon were serious about its support for strong affordable housing solutions, it would fully back this tax proposal and chip in to help address Seattle’s homelessness crisis. By threatening Seattle over this tax, Amazon is sending a message to all of our cities: We play by our own rules.”
Read the full article here.
Minority Groups Rally Outside Fed Against Interest Rate Hike
Observer - March 5, 2015, by Will Bredderman - Minority activist organizations demonstrated in the snow outside the...
Observer - March 5, 2015, by Will Bredderman - Minority activist organizations demonstrated in the snow outside the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, insisting that the institution keep interest rates low until stubbornly high unemployment rates in nonwhite communities drop further.
Immigrant advocacy group Make the Road NY and neighborhood organizers New York Communities for Change joined other left-leaning groups outside the lower Manhattan headquarters of the New York Fed, a branch of the national system that controls the interest rates at which lending institutions may borrow money from the United States government. The Fed has left the rates near zero since the financial crisis of 2008 in order to encourage investment, but it has indicated it might raise them this summer amid an improving economy.
The protesters, however, argued that black and Hispanic communities in New York City are still languishing in an economic doldrums, with jobless rates sitting at 11.2 percent and 5.7 percent respectively.
“These unemployment rates are not going to be better by this summer. We’re not a couple months away from a recovery,” said Shawn Sebastian from the Center for Popular Democracy, arguing that the Fed is looking only at a general joblessness picture that averages in the relatively low unemployment rates among whites. “They’re trying to look at the aggregate levels of unemployment and ignore how it’s disproportionately affecting minority communities to push this narrative about a recovery that we’re not experiencing.”
Chanting “don’t raise the rate,” the demonstrators insisted that New York Fed President William Dudley meet with their organizations to discuss the special needs of minorities.
“We need to sit down with him and have an honest conversation about why he needs to keep interest rates low in order to fight for our communities of color, so that we can make sure we are supplying jobs to all,” said Victoria Ruiz of Make the Road.
The protesters also lashed out at the Fed, which has the additional duty of regulating large banks, for failing to prevent lenders from issuing, packaging and selling dubious mortgage loans—which disproportionately went to black and Hispanic homeowners, with areas like Southeast Queens now leading the country in foreclosures.
“The banks, while the Fed was not watching what they were doing, was not doing its job supervising them, they went around snapping up subprime lenders and fueling all of that toxic subprime lending that happened,” said Alexis Iwanisziw of the New Economy Project, noting many major financiers have since paid out massive settlements to the Department of Justice for their activities.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York referred the Observer to chairwoman Janet Yellen’s remarks after the Fed’s meeting last December, when she said “it can be patient in beginning to normalize the stance of monetary policy.”
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Franken scandal haunts Gillibrand’s 2020 chances
Franken scandal haunts Gillibrand’s 2020 chances
Today, nearly a year after Gillibrand led the charge in calling for Franken’s resignation, the anger is fresh on the...
Today, nearly a year after Gillibrand led the charge in calling for Franken’s resignation, the anger is fresh on the minds of major donors across the country...Ana Maria Archila, co-executive director for the Center for Popular Democracy, called Gillibrand’s response “important and courageous.” “It probably made her more enemies than friends,” said Archila, who famously confronted Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) in a congressional elevator this summer during the Kavanaugh hearings.
Read the full article here.
“The People’s Fed”: Manufacturing Popular Support for Global Theft
“The People’s Fed”: Manufacturing Popular Support for Global Theft
How does one get invited to attend one of the most exclusive palavers on the planet? Well, if it’s the annual Jackson...
How does one get invited to attend one of the most exclusive palavers on the planet? Well, if it’s the annual Jackson Hole economic summit sponsored by the Federal Reserve System, it’s virtually a prerequisite that one belong to that elite fraternity of beings known as central bankers. Or a pointy-headed professor with a certified globalist bent. Or, it seems, a loudmouthed, obnoxious street radical with a Marxist-Leninist “social justice/economic democracy” bent.
So, if you’re a screaming activist with the Center for Popular Democracy, apparently, you have an open door, a welcoming hand, and a place at the table with the Jackson Hole uber-elite.“Federal Reserve officials sought to reassure a group of labor activists that the central bank isn’t going to cool down the economy just as a stronger labor market is reaching a broader swath of Americans,” reported the Wall Street Journal on August 26.
Here is an excerpt from the Journal’s report:
“We’re going to run [the economy] hot, get the unemployment rate down lower,” San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank President John Williams said at an unprecedented meeting with activists from the Campaign [sic for Popular Democracy’s Fed Up Campaign.
The meeting of activists and high-ranking Fed officials took place shortly before the start of the Kansas City Fed’s high-profile policy conference in Jackson Hole, Wyo. Central bankers in attendance included Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen’s two top lieutenants, New York Fed President William Dudley and Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer....
The left-leaning activist group Fed Up publicly met with eight Federal Reserve presidents Thursday to discuss inequality and interest rates during the central bank's annual meeting in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
Serious, responsible critics of the Fed of a conservative/libertarian bent would never receive similar cordial treatment, of course. That’s understandable, since they want to restrict the power of the Fed, or abolish it altogether. The left-wing activists, on the other hand, want to expand the power of the Fed, and to use those expanded powers to further socialize our economy and society. That is surprising to many people, but it shouldn’t be; it’s completely in line with Karl Marx’s handbook. The fourth plank in Marx’s 10 planks of the Communist Manifesto calls for “Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.” Bingo: That’s the Federal Reserve.
So, what is the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) and who is supporting it and its Fed Up Campaign? Not surprisingly, one of its major supporters is the Ford Foundation, which has been notorious for funding “progressive,” socialist, pro-communist, and outright communist organizations and individuals for more than seven decades. Also, among the CPD financial angels is the Open Philanthropy Project, which has generously funded CPD’s Fed Up Campaign, it boasts, to the tune of at least $2 million. And it has pledged millions more.
In our previous report on the Fed’s conference last weekend (Jackson Hole’s Gangsters and Banksters: What Are They Planning?) we utilized the Fed’s official list of conference attendees to underscore the fact that the Fed’s top echelon officials and advisers hail almost entirely from that elite cabal of globalist one-worlders, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Moreover, we pointed out, this confirmed a virtually non-stop control of the Fed by CFR members since the Fed’s inception, under the guidance of elite Wall Street banker Paul Warburg, who was also a founder of the CFR.
The same CFR hands are at work in the creation of the Astroturf Fed Up Campaign posing as a grassroots “opposition” force to the Fed. The Ford Foundation and many of the other tax-exempt foundations supporting this faux CPD effort are longtime funding arms for the globalist agenda. Ditto for many of the other controlled opposition groups that CPD/Fed Up list as their “Partners.” Here is a partial list of those CPD partners, most of which would scarcely exist, if not for the activist cash they regularly receive from their globalist paymasters they pretend to oppose:
Arkansas Community Organization
Living United for Change in Arizona
ACCE Institute (Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment)
Working Partnerships USA
CASA de Delaware
New Florida Majority
Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights
Good Jobs Now
Neighborhoods Organizing for Change
TakeAction Minnesota
New York Communities for Change
Common Good Ohio
CASA de Pennsylvania
Ohio Organizing Collaborative
Texas Organizing Project
Wisconsin Jobs Now
Clearly, as with #BlackLivesMatter and the many other Astroturf “progressive” organizations funded by billionaire George Soros (a CFR member and CFR President's Circle corporate supporter), the Fed Up Campaign is another example of CFR Insiders providing simultaneous pressure from above and below to effect social/political/economic/moral revolution.
By William F. Jasper
Source
Top Federal Reserve pick is controversial for Wells Fargo oversight and lack of diversity
Top Federal Reserve pick is controversial for Wells Fargo oversight and lack of diversity
Shawn Sebastian, field director of Fed Up, a campaign by labor, community and liberal activist groups that wants the...
Shawn Sebastian, field director of Fed Up, a campaign by labor, community and liberal activist groups that wants the Fed to enact pro-worker policies, said the choice of Williams damaged the Fed’s legitimacy and credibility.“Today, the Federal Reserve concluded another opaque and controversial Reserve Bank presidential selection process by ignoring the demands of the public and choosing yet another white man whose record on Wall Street regulation and full employment raises serious questions,” he said.
Read the full article here.
It’s Time to Reimagine Safety and Security in Our Communities
It’s Time to Reimagine Safety and Security in Our Communities
The over-policing and mass criminalization of Black and brown people is the moral crisis of our time. The United States...
The over-policing and mass criminalization of Black and brown people is the moral crisis of our time.
The United States has the world’s largest incarcerated population with approximately 2.2 million people currently behind prisons and jails (21 percent of the world’s prisoners) while several police departments across the country are under investigation for charges of police brutality, gross misconduct and civil rights violations.
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Weak Charter School Oversight Leads to Fraud and Mismanagement
DailyKos - May 6, 2014, by Laura Clawson - Charter schools benefit from a massive double standard, taking public money...
DailyKos - May 6, 2014, by Laura Clawson - Charter schools benefit from a massive double standard, taking public money without being subject to the regulations or oversight applied to traditional public schools. That lack of regulation and oversight has a cost, in students' educational experiences and in dollars. More than $100 million, as a new report from the Center for Popular Democracy and Integrity in Education shows.The report identifies six key types of abuse:
Charter operators using public funds illegally for personal gain:Joel Pourier, former CEO of Oh Day Aki Heart Charter School in Minnesota, who embezzled $1.38 million from 2003 to 2008. He used the money on houses, cars, and trips to strip clubs. Meanwhile, according to an article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the school “lacked funds for field trips, supplies, computers and textbooks.” A judge sentenced Mr. Pourier to 10 years in prison. Given the number of years, and the severity of the fraud, over a million dollars might have been saved had there been adequate charter oversight.
School revenue used to illegally support other charter operator businesses:For example, in 2012, the former CEO and founder of the New Media Technology Charter School in Philadelphia was sentenced to prison for stealing $522,000 in taxpayer money to prop up a restaurant, a health food store, and a private school.
Mismanagement that puts children in actual or potential danger:Ohio's State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Dr. Richard A. Ross, was forced to shut down two charter schools, The Talented Tenth Leadership Academy for Boys Charter School and The Talented Tenth Leadership Academy for Girls Charter School, because, according to Ross, “They did not ensure the safety of the students, they did not adequately feed the students, they did not accurately track the students and they were not educating the students well. It is unacceptable and intolerable that a sponsor and school would do such a poor job. It is an educational travesty.”
Charters illegally requesting public dollars for services not provided:[New Jersey] officials shut down the Regional Experiential Academic Charter High School after the state found, according to report in the New York Times, “a wide range of problems, including failure to provide special education students with the services required by state and federal law.
Some charter schools have also been caught illegally inflating their enrollment to collect money for students who weren't actually in the schools, while others have been tagged for general mismanagement of funds.
While some of the most egregious cases are found out, leading in some cases to prison sentences as cited above, we have no way of knowing how many similar situations haven't yet come to light. And in most cases, a prison sentence for the wrongdoer is all very well, but it won't get back the money that was supposed to go to educating kids. That's why the report calls for oversight agencies with teeth, able to catch fraud and mismanagement and actuallydo something about it; for charters to face the same transparency requirements public schools do, including following state open meetings and open records laws; and for charters to be governed by elected boards including parents, teachers, and, for high schools, students. Right now, in too many states charters are like the Wild West. Charter advocates like that when it lets them cut costs, increase profits and keep teachers non-union and as powerless as possible, of course. That's why we see so many state legislatures rapidly expanding charters without expanding oversight. They may not like straight-up theft, but it's a risk they're willing to run for all the other benefits of weak oversight.
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The financial reality facing America's 16 million retail workers
The financial reality facing America's 16 million retail workers
Shaheim Wright's house is falling apart. It's infested with bedbugs. The washing machine is broken. He needs a new sink...
Shaheim Wright's house is falling apart. It's infested with bedbugs. The washing machine is broken. He needs a new sink. Oh, and there's the crack in the bathtub.
"It's leaking out, and right near my door is a wet spot from water coming down," Wright said. "And it's like, well I can't pay for any of this."
Read the full article here.
2 months ago
2 months ago