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View From Here: We Need to See Clinton’s Speeches to Goldman Sachs

David Mark Greaves
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By David Mark Greaves

Now that Attorney General Schneiderman has reached a $5 billion settlement with Goldman Sachs, stemming from their “deceptive practices leading up to the financial crisis” in the mortgage industry, it makes it imperative to know what Secretary Clinton said to the assembled financial industry elites at $225,000 per speech.  Did she condone this behavior or even mention it?

Speaking of the banking industry, former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton Administration Robert Reich writes, “The biggest are far larger today than they were in 2008 when they were deemed ‘too big to fail’. Then, the five largest held around 30 percent of all U.S. banking assets. Today, they have 44 percent”.   Reich goes on to say, “According to a recent analysis by Thomas Hoenig, vice chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the assets of just four giant banks – JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Bank of America and Wells Fargo – amount to 97 percent of our nation’s entire gross domestic product in 2012”.  Given the opportunity to speak directly to them, did the Secretary express concern about how much of the economy is in the hands of the guests at the table on the right?

 

What did the Secretary have to say about the 99%?  Do we have to tighten our belts and be excited about the efficiencies realized when your good job is shipped overseas? What did she say to them about taxes and offshore profits?

Her banker speeches have to be made public before the convention.  Refusal to do so indicates that she understands that there is nothing there that the 99% would vote for.  As she runs from church to church, smiling and waving at the congregations, she has not yet met a pastor who would raise the question of what was said behind those closed doors.

The legendary pastor of Bethany Baptist Church William Augustus Jones used to say, “You eat the king’s meat, you do the king’s bidding”.  It was Rev. Jones who mentored a teenaged Al Sharpton and provided sanctuary, first in his car and then in the church for controversial rape victim Tawana Brawley in 1988.  Now there was a pastor who would challenge Secretary Clinton perhaps saying, “If we don’t know what you said, then we don’t know who you are”.

Hillary Clinton wants the vote, but does not want to reveal what she said to those who use loopholes to avoid billions of dollars in taxes.  At a press conference last week, President Obama said that this “gaming the system” by major corporations “come at the expense of middle-class families” and we can add at the expense of the poor as well.

The Secretary has said she does not understand why a large number of Americans simply do not trust her, blaming it on “rightwing conspiracies”.  There is no rightwing preventing her from revealing what she said to the bankers and money managers.   That’s her doing.   And if she continues to hide her speeches, then people can come to the conclusion that if she’s eating the king’s meat at $225,000 a serving, then doing the king’s bidding can’t be far behind.

A Way With Words: Meet Jamillah Wright, Founder & CEO of Write It Up

Editor, Our Time Press
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Jamillah Wright is Founder and CEO of Write It Up, a content strategy firm that specializes in technical writing, brand content and strategic communications. She has focused her 20-year career on creating content and marketing products for powerhouse brands like American Express, J.P. Morgan Chase and HBO. Now, as the owner of a writing company, she provides strategic content solutions for clients.

 

“I believe that content is a tool that accelerates innovation,” said Wright. “When companies elevate their content, they can truly transform their brand.”

 

Wright’s content background spans a range of sectors, including technology, financial services, education and health. One of her projects included creating content for a mobile payment app, which was acquired by Google. She is now focusing her attention on helping start-ups create content that quickly and accurately describes their product capabilities to their target market.

 

“I partner with start-ups to draft business proposals, one-pagers that summarize their products and general content to be consumed in the business-to-consumer space and by investors,” said Wright. She also collaborates with organizations and small businesses on Web, mobile and marketing content.

 

Wright combines extensive brand marketing experience with sharp writing and editing skills. Her specialty is capturing the unique voice and tone of a brand and delivering well-crafted copy that speaks to the needs and interests of its audience. Her clients have included TV One, Essence magazine and Baruch College. She has also completed content projects for Microsoft, Walmart, Ford, Sony, Showtime, SC Johnson, Western Union and more.

 

With a B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and a M.S. from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Wright is well-equipped to create content that is both useful and engaging. Her company is also certified as a Minority- and Women-owned Business Enterprise (MWBE) and hopes to partner with government agencies on content projects.

 

“I let clients know that I understand their challenges and then masterfully show them, through content, that I am their best solution,” said Wright.

 

For more information about Write It Up, visit writeitupinc.com.

 

 

 

 

 

Hillary and Bernie: Ask Not For The Community’s Allegiance; Declare Your Commitment to the Community

Bernice Elizabeth Green
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Bill Clinton, Alexander Clinton, Francis Constantine. Photo: Bernice Elizabeth Green

William “Bill” Clinton

Why can’t there be more affordable housing for the older people, and why can’t that housing be in Clinton Hill, Fort Greene, Boerum Hill or Brooklyn Heights? And they call “affordable” aren’t the apartments seniors who are on a fixed income can afford. I’ve been a business owner for 31 years and a real estate owner.

When Hillary visited Brown Memorial Church last Sunday, The Rev. Clinton Miller invited her to meet their “Bill” Clinton. Bill, seen here on the far left, stood and gave her the royal wave. The Georgia-born Clinton Hill homeowner has been in business for 37 years.

 

Alexander Clinton

We’re missing something when we don’t  take care of our seniors, and they are being left out of the conversation. We’re losing our heritage, and all that we built because our history is not in the textbooks. The Brooklyn native, 27, an employee with Home Depot, is one of Bill’s two sons, and an apprentice in his father’s boiler maintenance. He teaches swimming to seniors and young people, ages 7-12, on the weekends.

 

Francis Constantine

Why give immigrants a hard time, when they come here and work hard. The Jamaica native and homeowner

for 45 years works in home repairs and construction.

 

Natalie Agbaje

Natalie Agbaje, 31

I saw Hillary Clinton on the” Black Girls Rock” special the other night, and she talked about Black women being at the center, but what I really want to know is how is she going to help low-income families and when she said there are barriers holding African Americans and women back, what does she mean by it and what is she going to do. Resident of Flatbush

 

KAREN CHERRY

Candidate for New York State 56th Assembly District, Brooklyn Welcome to the world I grew up in, the

Karen Cherry

people I have known all my life.

Unfortunately, conversations are not being had on the national level about the real issues that concern the communities I call home and the people, particularly the seniors, I call my friends. Who speaks for them? So Hillary, you are a senior and a woman: if you did not have the finances and resources you have now, how would you cope, how would you deal with finding the money to pay for costly medical expenses, so-called affordable rents that are nothing but costly and high; living for months without a stove, how would you survive if you have worked hard all of your life, and now can’t afford an apartment or afford to live? Not only are people being preyed on

by greedy developers, people are living in the projects paying as much as $2,000 a month rent, and others are being displaced altogether as they watch luxury towers being constructed around them. When they are frozen by fear and hunger, and breathing asbestos dust as housing administrators race to clean up the mess while they are living in these apartments, who speaks for them, how do they keep warm, how do they keep healthy? Who would you go to, and how will you handle these situations that are going on with voters in cities around the nation?

 

Frankie A.

Frankie A.

It’s Trump who will deliver. He says what he really feels, and what no one’s saying. I’m tired of people coming here, making a lot of money and sending it back to their country. Frankie of Puerto Rican descent is a popular mailman who says there’s no other candidate for him except Trump. And he has no demands of the billionaire, just to

follow through on what he’s saying.

 

Randy Weston

Nobody talks about Black culture. That’s what’s missing. I’m totally with the ancestors, and I’m still studying Louis

Armstrong, King Oliver, Paul Robeson, Adam Clayton Powell, Dr. Ben, John Henrik Clarke, Langston

Randy Weston

Hughes. I’m in love with the great grandma who I never met, who came here and built a life with no money,

no resources. We have no Gil Noble who put cultural artists and politicians on the same level.

Bernie’s Plans: The Money is There

David Mark Greaves
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Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, right, takes “CBS Evening News” anchor Scott Pelley on a tour of his childhood neighborhood on February 10, 2016 in Brooklyn, New York. CBS NEWS

By David Mark Greaves

Secretary Hillary Clinton did a drive-by of three African-American churches in Brooklyn this past Sunday, where she assured the congregations that she was against gun violence, police shootings and was best buds with President Obama and the smiling pastors.

This was followed up with a town hall that wasn’t a town hall where she was assured the students that she was for a woman’s right to an abortion, equal pay and equality between men and women and the $15 per hour minimum wage.

This is what passes for outreach to the Black community and it’s insulting. Better she had been asked to explain why she keeps saying that Bernie Sanders’ plans are undoable when there is plenty of money available right now. But this is Sanders’ own fault.

When he says free college for all, everybody likes it but they know nothing is free and Sanders has to be clear on where the money will come from.

For example, Instead of free college, he could re-message it as college paid for by the Bermuda/Cayman Fund, pointing to a 2014 report, Offshore Shell Games 2014: The use of Offshore Tax Havens by Fortune 500 Companies by U.S. PIRG Ed Fund & Citizens for Tax Justice which says that multinational corporations such as Apple, Nike and Citigroup have nearly $2 trillion in “notorious tax havens” like Bermuda and the Cayman Islands, avoiding “an estimated $90 billion in federal income taxes each year.” Corporations like Apple and Google smile in your face and pick your pockets at the same time issuing corporate-righteous press releases abhorring discriminatory laws in North Carolina, while at the same time, avoiding paying their share of the cost of running this country.

He could drive home the January 2015 Democratic tax proposal introduced by Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), “Our current tax code imposes higher tax rates on income earned through hard work while providing preferential treatment to unearned financial gains and allowing billions of dollars of stock profits and other capital gains to pass tax-free to heirs of multimillion-dollar fortunes”. “Taken together,” he added, “the preferential tax treatment of certain kinds of nonwork, unearned income has contributed to a startling result: 17 percent of the major tax expenditures in the tax code flow to households with the top 1 percent of incomes. That translates into roughly $150 billion in tax breaks for the very wealthy each year.”

And then there’s the Transaction Tax on stock transfers, Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, and Representative Peter DeFazio, Democrat of Oregon, have introduced a bill in the past for such a tax, three cents per one hundred dollars, which the bipartisan Joint Committee on Taxation scored as raising $352 billion over 10 years.

Just those three possible resources equal a minimum of $275 billion not being contributed to the economy each year. And when Clinton gives her go-to answer, a dog-whistle” to all to split their votes between a Democrat for President and a Republican for Congress, Sanders has to talk about the great possibility of electing a Democratic Congress, especially now that the Republican electorate has shown they have contempt for the establishment and would not be adverse to retrieving the tax money owed to the country to invest in its citizens and its infrastructure, the nation’s most important assets.

If you want to do something other than talk about being against poverty and violence, then $275 billion being put into education, health and the infrastructure repair work waiting to be done would go a long way to breaking negative cycles. And when the Secretary tries to wrap the senator in the NRA, he should note that his relationship with that organization is public knowledge, while her relationship with Goldman Sachs is not. “Let’s see the speeches” should be the response. If only because the Clinton Foundation had revenues of nearly $149 million in 2013. Maintaining that revenue requires friends and understandings that make knowing the text of Clinton’s Goldman Sachs speeches so important. How close does the private speech come to matching the public rhetoric? Better that text come out now rather than in October against John Kasich as the Republican candidate.

View From Here: Elections 2016

David Mark Greaves
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By David Mark Greaves

Women’s History Month is ending and Hillary Clinton is currently leading in the Democratic delegate, and were she to win the nomination, history-making in itself, she may well consider having Senator Elizabeth Warren as her running mate. It would bring the Sanders forces on board and she need not worry about “balancing” the ticket with a guy, she could instead go with the strongest person available and double down on a history-making ticket.
For more political history-making, you need go no further than Assemblywoman Annette Robinson stepping away from a political career that spanned thirty-nine years. In doing so, she passed the torch to a fellow member of the VIDA political club, fulfilling the club mission of placing their people in
elective office. However as the emergence of Donald J. Trump has demonstrated, this is a double-edged power.
On the one side you get a person who has a vested in the community, is known locally and who knows the rules and the political playing field. On the other side, there is the risk of becoming out of touch with everyday voters, making decision based on what’s best for club members, losing connections to the base, and therefore opening the door for a demagogue like Trump or a proven community activist like Al Vann in 1974.
“I made my reputation because of the other things that I did, other than what I got paid for,” the then Assemblyman told Our Time Press in a 2001 interview. “I didn’t get paid to organize the African American Teacher’s Association. I didn’t get paid to be involved in negotiating for Medgar Evers
College and bringing that into the community. I didn’t get paid for serving on the board of Bed-Stuy antipoverty organizations, or Bed-Stuy Restoration Corporation.” And it was based on his unpaid activism and reputation in the Black consciousness movement that he was essentially drafted to run against entrenched leadership and won. “I did not come into politics because I wanted to be an Assemblyman. I was involved in trying to make a difference in the community. …I didn’t just sit back and look at people and say I want to be an elected official. I was doing things in the community, that’s my criteria.”

And based on that criteria, any potential challenger has to have a local following, support, and be able to deliver a message of local empowerment, asking, “Is the community better off now than it was ten years ago?” They’ll be running from behind, but as the Bernie Sanders and the first Al Vann
campaigns have shown, establishment endorsements mean a lot to those showing up at the announcements and rallies, but not so much to constituents with their backs against the wall, a bleak future ahead, and who are looking for leadership that they believe is on their side and ready to fight for them.

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