Tag: Activism

Quote of the Day

Honestly, I don’t think I would have said anything because obviously he’s not listening to scientists and experts, so why would he listen to me?

Greta Thunberg when asked about what she would say if given the chance to talk to Donald Trump

This young woman has a legendary level of bad-assery.

As I’ve said  before, she is living proof as to why Vikings scared the sh%$ out Europe for 500 years.

Corrupt

The California NAACP came out against an initiative that would make implementing rent control easier.

Days later, it’s president got a 6 figure consulting contract from the realtors opposing the initiative:

The president of the California NAACP has long resisted criticism that she melds the group’s interests with those of her political consulting firm, which takes in large fees for working on campaigns that the civil rights organization backs.

Critics say Alice Huffman is doing it again on what is shaping up to be one of the most bitterly contested measures on the November ballot Proposition 10, which would repeal a state law that limits cities’ ability to impose rent control.

The state NAACP’s 28-member executive committee voted in May to oppose Prop. 10. Huffman said the group agreed with arguments that allowing stricter forms of rent control would discourage housing construction and therefore hurt low-income tenants.

A month after the NAACP voted, Huffman said, her AC Public Affairs political consulting firm in Sacramento signed a deal to be a lead consultant on the opposition’s $800,000 campaign targeting African American voters through mailers and workers who will go door-to-door.

Apparently Ms. Huffman saw Delray Mckesson’s Patagonia vest endorsement deal, and thought, “Here, hold my beer.”

She claims that she does not accept contracts from companies that oppose the state NAACP positions, but she is the president of the organization, so she is in a position to move the group in a way that benefits her financially, as she did when the NAACP, and AC Public, played both sides of the street regarding cigarette taxes in 2006 and 2016.

America, where no good deed goes uncorrupted.

The Resistance: Grift Edition

Scott Dworkin aggressively raised funds for his anti-Trump “resistance” group, the Democratic Coalition Against Trump, and then he kept most of the money for himself and his friends:

Omar Siddiqui couldn’t make it to an August fundraiser in Beverly Hills for the Democratic Coalition Against Trump. But he ponied up the $2,000 ticket price after the group’s senior adviser, Scott Dworkin, sent him a personal invitation.

Months later, Siddiqui, the Democratic challenger to Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), was surprised to discover his money—or three of every four dollars of it—had gone to the coffers of consultants and lawyers the group leaned on to fight a libel suit, rather than pushing back against the president.

When told by The Daily Beast how the group had spent his money, Siddiqui was, charitably speaking, not pleased.

“Being an attorney,” he said, “I intend to investigate this further and look forward to receiving a full explanation about the use of donations.”

The Democratic Coalition, one of the many new progressive-minded organizations to bloom in the age of anti-Trump fervor, brought in nearly half a million dollars last year. Its donors include Siddiqui, a pair of Hollywood television producers, a former Real Housewife of Miami, and a member of the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors. The vast majority of its funds, however, have come from people whose names don’t make it into Federal Election Commission disclosures: the small, “unitemized” donors who give $200 or less.

It’s what the group has done with its money—not how much it has brought in—that has raised eyebrows among other operatives.

The Democratic Coalition paid more than half of the money it raised last year to its employees or their consulting firms, according to Federal Election Commission records. Dworkin’s Bulldog Finance Group was the chief beneficiary, drawing more than $130,000 from The Democratic Coalition.

This is what is wrong with the Democratic Party establishment in a nutshell.

The DNC requires candidates that it supports to spend a large proportion of their money on a consultant from their list, and Scott Dworkin is most assuredly on their list, at least until this story came out.

First, we need to end the grifting.

More of This

Unlike some progressives, the Greens come to mind, it appears that Bernie Sanders Democrats are working to take over the California Democratic Party.

This is the sort of stuff that needs to be done, it is a grueling grind, but this is what the flying monkey wing of the Republican Party did after Goldwater’s loss in 1964, and it took them nearly 20 years to take over.

Seriously, more of this:

For California’s “Berniecrats,” the fire’s not out yet.

Nearly a year after propelling Sen. Bernie Sanders to a close second finish against Hillary Clinton in California’s presidential primary, some of his most ardent supporters are still organizing – this time within the state Democratic Party itself.

At stake is the party chairmanship held by the departing John Burton, a liberal icon, a longtime lawmaker and former Senate leader who became chair in 2009.

Vying to replace Burton are L.A. County Democratic Party leader Eric Bauman, currently the state party’s vice chair and a major power in California labor politics. Facing him is activist Kimberly Ellis, the director of Emerge California, which seeks to have more women and people of color elected to public office.

Rather than fading into the sunset with their defeated standard-bearer, Sanders’ activists emerged from November both irked and emboldened.

They have joined forces with other some other progressives to support Ellis and take over the party’s leadership, promote a more left-leaning policy agenda and diminish the clout of corporations and business-friendly moderates.

………

They surprised insiders by dominating the obscure process — electing a third of the delegates for the state convention, scheduled for May 19-21 in Sacramento. They believe they have turned the once-sleepy race for a new party chair into a serious contest with Bauman, long viewed as the front-runner.

“We see our biggest opportunity as the party,” Edelstein said. “We want to make a concerted effort. If we can change California, we can change the rest of the country.”

………

[Former Santa Cruz Assemblyman Fred] Keeley said the continued organizing and activism by Sanders backers is rooted in their long-term agenda.

“The organization has continued on because it wasn’t a personality cult or anything close to it,” he said. “These folks by and large are relatively sophisticated players. They do understand that while this may be mind-numbing and uninteresting to most people, this is the thing you need to do to effect change.”

Once the dust settled from November, California’s Berniecrats focused on the weekend party meetings held in January to elect state party delegates from each Assembly district. They partnered with other progressives to build slates of candidates and then used Hustle – a texting application used extensively in the Sanders campaign – to turn supporters out.

(emphasis mine)

This is how you gain effective political power.  It’s a lot duller than, for example, running Ralph Nader for president, but this sort of concerted efforts at the local level works  ……… If it can be sustained.

Win or lose, they are going to have to fight this battle for decades.

Spocko Did This a Decade Ago

10 years ago, Spocko, the blogger who runs Spocko’s Brain, started to send records to advertisers showing what hate-talk radio jocks were showing immediately before and after these ads.

He asked a simple question: Do you really want your products associated with this?

It now appears that it has dawned on online activists that they can do the same thing with online news.

It’s even easier, you just have to email a screen shot with their ad and a headline:

One day in late November, an earth and environmental science professor named Nathan Phillips visited Breitbart News for the first time. Mr. Phillips had heard about the hateful headlines on the site — like “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy” — and wondered what kind of companies would support such messages with their ad dollars. When he clicked on the site, he was shocked to discover ads for universities, including one for the graduate school where he’d received his own degree — Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. “That was a punch in the stomach,” he said.

Why would an environmental science program want to be promoted on a site that denies the existence of climate change? Mr. Phillips figured — correctly — that Duke officials did not know where their ads were appearing, so he sent a tweet to Duke about its association with the “sexist racist” site. Eventually, after a flurry of communication with the environment department, he received a satisfying resolution — an assurance that its ads would no longer show up on Breitbart.

………

In mid-November, a Twitter group called Sleeping Giants became the hub of the new movement. The Giants and their followers have communicated with more than 1,000 companies and nonprofit groups whose ads appeared on Breitbart, and about 400 of those organizations have promised to remove the site from future ad buys.

“We’re focused on Breitbart News right now because they’re the biggest fish,” a founder of Sleeping Giants told me. (He requested anonymity because some members of the group work in the digital-media industry.) Eventually, Sleeping Giants would like to broaden its campaign to take on a menagerie of bad actors, but that would require a much bigger army of Giants, and “it has only been a month since we started doing this,” he told me when I talked to him in December. Then he added, “This has been the longest month of my life.”

Advertisers have been fleeing Rush Limbaugh’s show for precisely the same reason ever since he tried to slut shame Sandra Fluke, and it appears from the silence over the numbers, last time around they were trumpeting the numbers, that he took a significant pay cut.

Everyone has a right to free speech, but that doesn’t mean that they have a right for you to support their sponsors.