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Mayor-Elect Eric Adams and Incoming Chancellor David Banks, Wow!

“A Change is Coming”

View From Here
By David Mark Greaves

We have never given an enthusiastic “Yeah!” for a press conference, but the one held by Eric Adams and David Banks expressed the passion and vision that that are needed, to properly educate a school population already bombarded by every societal roadblock to intellectual development, in the city and in the schools.


Chancellor-elect Banks said Adams told him, “‘We spend $38 billion every year budget in this system, and 65% of Black and Brown children never achieve proficiency.’ That’s a betrayal and we ought to be outraged by that…You could get those results even without a Department of Education.” Here, in the most competitive city in the world, Banks says he has to start at the proper way to teach reading.

“I have a message for a lot of folks down at Tweed (Department of Education headquarters) who think that they know me,” but apparently are in for a rude awakening. “Here’s the question that will be asked of everybody throughout this department: ‘If you left and your job disappeared tomorrow, would that change anything that’s going on in any of our schools? Fundamentally, the job that you have, if it disappeared tomorrow, does it change the life on anyone that goes here to PS 161? Because if it does not, why do we continue to support it? Change is coming. The system will be reengineered from the bottom up.”


Mayor-elect Adams reiterated that later saying that the education budget will be focused on the children and those in the system whose work does not directly impact the growth and development of the children, “should be concerned” about their continued employment.
“This is no ordinary announcement,” said Banks, in very much of an understatement.
If you are interested in education and want to be thrilled by a press conference, go to YouTube, enter Eric Adams David Banks and watch the One Brooklyn video.


As he moves to remake the Department of Education, we suggest someone check the archives for the Board of Education’s 1994 report, “The Commission on Students of African Descent.”
Rather than reinvent every spoke of the wheel, the information in that report, shelved and hidden away, can only be helpful as the new mayor and chancellor “turn over the tables” at the department. Excerpts from the report, reprinted from Our Time Press in 2002, start on page 6.

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Keechant Sewell to Become First Woman to Lead NYPD. Wow again!
Mayor-elect Eric Adams says Nassau County chief of detectives, Keechant Sewell, has the “emotional intelligence” and the ability to “scale up” her experience to run the 34,000 member NYPD as the first woman police commissioner in the department’s 176 year history.
The Washington Post, quoting Adams in the New York Post said, “Chief Sewell will wake up every day laser-focused on keeping New Yorkers safe and improving our city, and I am thrilled to have her at the helm of the NYPD,” Adams told the newspaper, which reported that during her job interview, Sewell had to show she could handle a “mock press conference about the shooting of an apparently unarmed black man by a white police officer.”

Three Against Trump
As the extent of the plotting of a coup in the United States is revealed by the Select Committee investigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol, and the acknowledgement that the instigators of the January 6 insurrection, everything leading up to it and all that has followed, the Committee intends to hold the planners accountable for their goal of installing an authoritarian state with Trump at the head.


While the Committee continues its work, and plans to hold must-watch TV hearings early next year, there are a trio of legal investigations being led by two, and soon three, African Americans, that the fate of the nation may depend on, as the Committee will itself be disbanded if the Republicans take control of congress after the midterm elections.
First up is New York State Attorney General Letitia James and her office of over 700 attorneys. AG James has already said she will subpoena Trump for a deposition in the civil inquiry her office is conducting into his business practices. 
Second is in Fulton County, Georgia, where the Atlantic Journal reports that “District Attorney Fani Willis is likely to impanel a special grand jury to support her probe of former President Donald Trump, a move that could aid prosecutors in what’s expected to be a complicated and drawn-out investigative process.”


The Journal goes on to note that “Gwendolyn Keyes Fleming, previously a DeKalb County DA. co-authored a Brookings Institution report earlier this fall that analyzed all available public evidence and concluded that Trump’s conduct leaves him at ‘substantial risk of possible state charges predicated on multiple crimes.’”
Third is incoming Manhattan District Attorney Mr. Alvin Bragg, who will be taking over that office’s criminal investigation of Donald Trump and the Trump Organization.


As these cases proceed over the months before the 2022 elections and Donald Trump finds himself fighting paper trails that lead straight to him, we will see if so-called Trumpism can survive reality and that we can survive as the nation we’ve all known.

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