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| Happy homecoming for local in Battle of Stonington 5K | Sports | thewesterlysun. |
| Posted on Thursday, August 20 @ 00:01:53 PDT (0 reads) | |
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Stonington — the 26th annual battle of stonington 5k race in the borough was a homecoming for former stonington all-state runner ryan gruczka.
gruczka, who along with josh mooney led the bears to three track state championships in 2022 and 2023, ran his first battle of stonington race since winning in 2021 and finishing second in 2022.
gruczka showed hes doing more than majoring in finance at northeastern university, doing a co-op internship at wellington management and set to graduate a year earlier than the normal five-year timeframe there. Thats enough for most people, but hes doing some serious work on the track for the division i huskies of boston as mooney is for the uconn huskies.
it showed tuesday. He covered the congested field of 320 around the 5k course around narrow borough streets in 15:34. Thats faster than his winning 16:26 time in 2021 and second-place 15:58 a year later.
he was second that year to waterfords chris helminski. This year, gruczka showed what showed the value of college training as helminski, 32, was third in 16:44, more than a minute behind the winner.
its great to be back and home in a great community of runners, gruczka said. Ive been in boston in the last three summers at school. My time was solid. I didnt want to go super hard ahead of my season. Ive run 14:43 on the track in the 5000 meters, but this is different on roads. Im happy to be injury free and looking forward to finishing my career strong.
gruczka runs cross country, indoor track and outdoor track at northeastern. He recorded a personal best 4:15 in the mile and a 19:10 in a 6k cross country race. 1:54.38 in the 800, 8:28.91 in the 3,000, and a 14:43.20 in the 5,000, hes also added the steeplechase to his distance tool bag. Hes made colonial athletic conference all-academic honor roll three times.
henry winn of sherman oaks, calif. Finished second in 16:29. Winn, who spends summers with his family in watch hill, won the bottone mile in late july but quickly learned a division i college runner is different than the prep school competition he deals with at deerfield academy where hell start his final year in about a week.
i dont know many runners and i didnt know (gruczka), but right away i could tell he was very fast, winn said. After a while i just wanted to run a decent time, which i did.
a ledyard cross country contingent helped fill out the top 10. Greyson stephenson, raymond grogan and lucas heide finished fourth through sixth in the 17 minute range. Lisbons ben jeffs was seventh in 17:40, followed by hunter lupo and sam grogan of gales ferry. Both finished in 18:02.
mark hixson, 61, of simsbury turned in an impressive 10th overall in 18:17. Jack wagner, 17, of stonington was the top local behind gruczka in 11th place with a time of 18:36.
abby murdock of westerly was the top female finisher, 24th overall, in 19:28.
other locals to finish high in their age groups were lucy whipple, 13, of mystic (76th overall, 22:46), charlie graham, 13, of pawcatuck (75th, 22:43), josephine hatch, 16, of mystic (78th 22:54), claire brannegan, 15, of pawcatuck (85th, 23:16), meg rolfe of pawcatuck (112th, 25:01), olivia backhaus of mystic (49th, 21:18 for top 30-39 female), shelly rivera of mystic (37th, 20:15 for top 40-49 female), melanie diamanti of pawcatuck (104th, 23:07 for top 50-59 female). Carol rose of westerly (79th, 23:01 for top 60-69 female), jeff vuono of westerly (37th, 20:02 for 2nd 60-69 male) and jim doherty of stonington (120th, 25:34 for top 70-79 male).
complete results can be found on snerro. |
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| Public universities face escalating involvement from state lawmakers |
| Posted on Thursday, August 20 @ 00:01:53 PDT (0 reads) | |
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Jennifer brooks, a history professor at auburn university, had barely unpacked from a trip out of town earlier this month when the messages started blowing up her phone.
texts from colleagues and rumors on social media delivered the unsettling news: the auburn board of trustees had voted to dissolve the school’s faculty senate and give itself ultimate authority over academic decisions, including curriculum.
“what was really surprising … is the lack of knowledge that most of our faculty leaders had about the decision,” said brooks, who’s been teaching at auburn since 2006.
faculty leaders across departments at auburn — one of two flagship public universities in alabama — said they learned of the proposal a day before the vote. The board approved the changes unanimously and without public discussion.
“to have that (decision) be the sole product of the board of trustees, with no input from faculty, is really unusual,” brooks said.
the move at auburn came two months after alabama’s republican-dominated state legislature passed a law curtailing the power of faculty senates at the state’s public colleges and universities. That law exempted auburn and the university of alabama, because their governing structures are enshrined in the state constitution. Some faculty felt auburn’s eagerness to follow it anyway signals the board’s willingness to bend to political pressure.
the auburn trustees did not respond to a request for comment, though the board said in a statement that its new policy is “intended to advance academic quality, transparency, consistency and institutional alignment while preserving meaningful faculty participation.”
alabama isn’t alone. Since last year, kentucky, tennessee, texas and utah have enacted similar laws that give greater power to politically appointed boards and administrators while weakening tenure protections and faculty sway over curriculum and university leadership. In indiana, the new state budget gives republican gov. Mike braun full authority to appoint members of indiana university’s board of trustees.
supporters of such measures frame them as efforts to hold taxpayer-funded public colleges and universities accountable at a time when many americans are questioning the value of increasingly expensive college degrees. Many conservative lawmakers also say they are taking aim at liberal bias on university campuses.
multiple studies have found that professors tend to be liberal, though it’s less clear whether they are pushing their views in the classroom. In a 2022-23 survey by the higher education research institute at ucla, nearly 56% of faculty described themselves as liberal or far left, compared with about 13% who said they were conservative or far right and roughly 32% who described themselves as “middle of the road.”
“i think our institutions do need to be run, at a minimum, fiscally, as a business, so that we make sure that the money our taxpayers are pouring into … our universities is used and utilized in the correct way,” kentucky republican state sen. Lindsey tichenor said earlier this year before voting for a measure to allow the state’s public colleges and universities to fire faculty for financial reasons, such as low enrollment in a particular program or department or a budget shortfall.
opponents said the measure was a way for legislators to get around higher education tenure protections. Democratic gov. Andy beshear vetoed the bill, but lawmakers overrode him.
faculty advocates, free speech groups and unions warn the new wave of laws will chill academic freedom and make universities more susceptible to political influence.
“students, faculty and staff in almost every state have less say in how colleges and universities are run than they did a generation ago, and i don’t know if that resonates with members of the public,” said barrett taylor, a professor at the university of north texas whose research focuses on higher education policy, finance and governance.
“i do think most people probably don’t want to send their kids to a college where they feel like the politicians are in charge,” he said.
unprecedented power
one of the most far-reaching of the new measures is a texas law enacted last year that grants political appointees unprecedented power over the state’s public colleges and universities.
university boards, which are appointed by the texas governor, now have authority over hiring decisions of college administrators and more control over university curricula. The new law, passed by the republican-majority state legislature, also limits the power of faculty senates and councils, shifting them to advisory-only roles.
texas republican state rep. Matt shaheen, the bill’s sponsor, told his colleagues on the house floor last year that its goal is “to ensure degrees earned in texas are of value and prepare our students for success, both in life and in the workforce.”
the senate sponsor of texas’ new law was then-state sen. Brandon creighton, a republican who became chancellor at texas tech university a few months after the bill passed. Using his authority under the new law, creighton in april ordered the school to cancel academic programs centered on sexual orientation and gender identity, and directed faculty to recognize only “two human sexes.”
in a recent survey by the texas tech university faculty senate, about half of the faculty who responded said they chose to alter their teaching content in response to memos from creighton and another chancellor laying out new guidelines and restrictions on course content. More than half said they were considering jobs at other universities.
since the law was enacted, several professors at other texas public universities have been fired: a texas state professor was fired after speaking about political organization at a socialist conference; a texas a&m professor lost her job after a video of her discussing gender identity with a student went viral; and a professor at the university of texas, austin, was dismissed from his senior vice provost role for “ideological differences.”
texas republican gov. Greg abbott, in response to the vice provost’s ouster, said on x that “texas is targeting professors who are more focused on pushing leftist ideologies rather than preparing students to lead our nation.”
model legislation
texas’ new law closely tracks model legislation shared in february by the manhattan institute, a conservative think tank. On its website, the institute argues that university board members “can act as a counterweight to the excesses of university faculty and administrators,” and that too much faculty autonomy has made campuses “insular and sclerotic.”
state involvement is necessary, the institute argues, to hold universities accountable to the public. It says that required general education courses should be reviewed and approved annually by administrative boards to make sure they’re relevant and worthy of public investment.
distrust in higher education has become an election issue, john sailer, the manhattan institute’s director of higher education policy, wrote in an email.
“legislation is a blunt-force instrument but it isn’t sufficient,” sailer said. He emphasized that changes have to happen at the institutional level. “Concretely, this looks like giving boards a say in matters that reflect the university’s overarching mission, like the core curriculum.”
but critics argue that everyone benefits from colleges and universities that aren’t subject to partisan politicization. They say the move toward top-down governance at universities will erode academic freedom and pressure faculty to align their research and teaching with ideological interests rather than independent inquiry.
and university boards are increasingly chosen for political loyalty and wealth, rather than for commitment to the institution, said hank reichman, professor emeritus at california state university, east bay, and former chair of an academic freedom committee at the american association of university professors.
“i think people are naive if they think that (lawmakers’) political agenda will be limited to just getting rid of dei and gender studies programs,” he said, adding that he’s seen interference in medicine and other sciences. “It’s really an attack on independent learning.”
action in multiple states
in indiana last year, lawmakers gave the governor sole appointing power over indiana university’s board of trustees by slipping the language into a must-pass budget bill in the final hours of the legislative session. It also limited faculty boards to advisory-only roles.
“the state has an interest in being sure that it (the university) is operated in the best way,” indiana republican state rep. Jeff thompson told his colleagues on the house floor last april. “And by the way, the governor would be the one that has to answer to the people.”
braun later exercised his new power by removing three members of the university’s board who’d been elected by school alumni under the previous system. Braun’s replacements included two conservatives: an attorney who previously worked on his campaign and a conservative commentator and former sports reporter who was suspended by espn in 2021 for statements about barack obama’s father and her company’s covid-19 vaccine requirements.
in april of this year, tennessee also enacted a law increasing top-down governance by barring university leadership from taking faculty recommendations on disciplinary decisions. Under higher education’s tradition of shared governance, such decisions would usually involve input from a tenured faculty member’s peers.
lawmakers in other states also are exerting control over academic programs and degree requirements.
iowa republican lawmakers inserted a requirement into a budget bill approved last month that undergraduate students at the state’s three public universities take both an american history course and one on american government in order to graduate. State lawmakers mandated that those courses at the university of iowa must come through the center for intellectual freedom, which they created last year to counter what they viewed as liberal bias in education.
utah passed a law this year that diminishes faculty control over exams and assignments, allowing students to request exemptions based on “sincerely held” beliefs, as well as a law that restructures university oversight.
ohio lawmakers this year tried to tie university funding to institutions’ compliance with a law they passed last year banning dei efforts, but the bill died in committee.
and in kansas, the gop-controlled legislature overrode democratic gov. Laura kelly’s veto of a bill named for charlie kirk, the late conservative activist, that bans college free-speech zones that limit where students can protest or advocate for causes.
the legislature also tucked a provision into its budget bill that bans public colleges from requiring students to take courses on “dei-crt,” the acronyms for diversity, equity and inclusion, and critical race theory, respectively.
suspicious of higher ed
republican lawmakers have been pushing some of the most visible changes, but both political parties are interested in exerting more control over higher education, said taylor, the university of north texas professor.
“we’re not arguing that the two parties’ agendas for higher ed are commensurate or equally likely to have the same consequences,” taylor said, “but we do think that both parties are suspicious of higher education and are seeking to exert more control over it, though in very different ways.”
as a historian, auburn professor brooks said she and some of her department colleagues were not surprised to see political battles spill onto campus. The changes have been more jarring, she said, for faculty members in disciplines that are further removed from the culture wars, such as forestry or engineering.
“there seems to be a sense from the (university) administration that the only faculty that are disturbed, unsettled, distressed about the situation are a small group of malcontents,” she said. “I think that’s a complete misconception. It’s widespread.”
stateline reporter anna claire vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.Org
this story was originally produced by stateline, which is part of states newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes ohio capital journal, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
ohio capital journal is part of states newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio capital journal maintains editorial independence. Contact editor david dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.Com. |
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| Science Doesnt Need Government Money |
| Posted on Thursday, August 20 @ 00:01:53 PDT (0 reads) | |
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Washington is stoping the gravy train of money for science that made no sense. Governments have funded numerous projects that are ridiculous, frivolous, or pointless.
perhaps the problem isn’t that washington is spending too little on science. Perhaps the problem is that we came to expect washington to fund science in the first place.
here are well-documented examples that have drawn particular ridicule:
- shrimp on a treadmill (nsf): researchers at the college of charleston received grants totaling around $1.3 million over roughly a decade to study how bacterial infections and environmental stresses affect crustacean metabolism and performance. A custom underwater treadmill was used to exercise shrimp and crabs under controlled conditions. Critics amplified it as “$3 million to put shrimp on treadmills”. It became a viral symbol of “silly science.”
- robotic squirrel vs. Rattlesnakes (nsf): a ~$325,000–$390,000 grant supported development of “robosquirrel” by researchers at san diego state university and uc davis. It tested predator-prey signaling: how ground squirrels use tail-flagging and infrared cues to deter rattlesnakes. The robotic element made it an easy target for mockery.
- study on why people fall in love (nsf, early golden fleece): one of proxmire’s first awards went to an ~$84,000 nsf grant examining the nature of romantic love. Critics saw it as pure fluff; defenders noted basic social/psychological research.
- smart toilet / “analprint” camera system (nih/national cancer institute): stanford researchers received roughly $6.9–$7 million to develop a “smart toilet” that uses cameras, sensors, and ai to analyze urine and stool for health biomarkers. User identification included scanning unique anal morphology (“analprint”) alongside fingerprints. The privacy and optics issues made it highly mockable, though the stated goal was passive, continuous health monitoring.
- other recurring targets: mountain lions on treadmills for physiology/ecology instruments; studies of hamster aggression (“hamster fight club”); swedish massages for rabbits to study post-exercise recovery; cia “acoustic kitty” (1960s attempt to implant surveillance gear in cats—more intelligence than pure science); and various social-science grants on baby-name trends, online dating preferences, or political donation motivations.
taxpayers should be forced to finance such a wasteful use of money.
government funding for science is not the same as supporting science
opposing government funding for science is not the same thing as opposing science.
i want more scientific discovery. I want better medicines, better computers, cheaper energy, longer lives, more efficient agriculture, better artificial intelligence, and technologies we haven’t even imagined yet.
the question is: who should decide which scientific ideas deserve resources? And why should the taxpayer be stuck with the bill? Taxes are high enough, and there are thousands of programs paid for by the government, but the reality is that all those programs continue squeezing the taxpayer more and more.
when government finances research, politicians and government agencies ultimately decide how taxpayer money gets distributed. Scientists naturally adapt to that system because obtaining grants becomes part of their profession.
but there is another possibility.
companies, universities, philanthropists, nonprofit organizations, foundations, investors, wealthy individuals and scientific institutions could finance competing ideas with their own money.
instead of one giant political mechanism allocating resources, thousands of independent organizations could decide which scientific bets they want to make.
science existed before washington started writing checks
government research grants did not create science.
for centuries, scientific discovery was supported through a mixture of patronage, universities, scientific societies, commercial interests and personal fortunes.
galileo received support from wealthy patrons, including the medici family. European monarchs and merchants financed voyages, astronomy, cartography and navigation because better knowledge had practical and commercial value.
universities became centers of scholarship.
scientific societies brought researchers together.
later, wealthy philanthropists established laboratories, universities, hospitals and research institutes.
then came one of the most extraordinary institutions in the history of science: the industrial research laboratory.
companies discovered that scientific knowledge itself could be valuable.
they began paying scientists to explore.
private laboratories have changed the world
we sometimes talk about fundamental science as if businesses will finance only projects capable of generating a profit next quarter.
history tells a different story.
bell labs, originally the research organization of at&t and western electric, employed thousands of scientists and engineers and became one of history’s great centers of scientific discovery.
researchers working in industrial laboratories have made discoveries that transformed everyday life.
1. The transistor — bell labs
in 1947, john bardeen, walter brattain and william shockley developed the transistor at bell labs.
the transistor became one of the foundations of modern civilization.
your smartphone, laptop, television, automobile and virtually every modern electronic device contain descendants of this technology.
a private industrial laboratory helped launch the electronics revolution.
2. The laser — bell labs and hughes research laboratories
arthur schawlow and charles townes developed crucial ideas behind the laser while associated with bell labs and columbia university, and theodore maiman demonstrated the first working laser at hughes research laboratories in 1960.
today lasers are everywhere.
they are used in telecommunications, manufacturing, medicine, barcode scanners, scientific instruments and countless other technologies.
private companies had powerful incentives to develop the technology because they could imagine applications for it—even when nobody knew how enormous those applications would eventually become.
3. The cosmic microwave background — bell labs
sometimes private research produces something with no obvious product to sell at all.
bell labs researchers arno penzias and robert wilson discovered cosmic microwave background radiation in 1964 while working with a large radio antenna.
their discovery provided enormously important evidence about the origins of the universe.
what was the immediate consumer product?
there wasn’t one.
yet fundamental science happened inside a corporate laboratory.
4. The scanning tunneling microscope — ibm
ibm physicists gerd binnig and heinrich rohrer developed the scanning tunneling microscope in the early 1980s.
the instrument allowed scientists to study surfaces at the atomic scale and became an important tool in nanotechnology and materials science.
their work earned them the nobel prize in physics.
once again, groundbreaking science emerged from an industrial laboratory.
5. The computing revolution at xerox parc
xerox established its palo alto research center in 1970 and gave talented researchers extraordinary freedom to experiment.
the results included major advances in ethernet, graphical user interfaces, laser printing, personal computing, digital graphics and object-oriented programming.
many of the ideas developed there eventually became fundamental components of modern computing.
these examples don’t prove that government has never contributed to science. It obviously has.
they demonstrate something different and important:
scientific discovery does not require government to have a monopoly on deciding which ideas deserve funding.
government money politicizes science
there is an unavoidable problem with government funding.
government money is political money.
one administration decides climate research deserves more resources. Another administration changes the priorities. Congress changes. Agency leadership changes. Budgets change.
scientists then find themselves fighting political battles because their laboratories depend upon political decisions.
we shouldn’t be surprised by this.
if government controls the money, government will have influence over how the money is spent.
reducing government funding for science could ultimately make scientific institutions less dependent on politicians, not more.
scientists respond to incentives too
scientists are human beings.
if washington announces billions of dollars in grants for a particular field, researchers have an incentive to move toward that field.
they learn which research proposals receive grants.
they learn which terminology grant committees favor.
they spend enormous amounts of time preparing applications, satisfying bureaucratic requirements and competing for government funding.
that doesn’t mean scientists are dishonest.
it means incentives work.
a decentralized system would create different incentives because scientists could seek money from many competing sources rather than depending so heavily on government agencies.
who is better at allocating capital?
suppose there are 10,000 scientific projects seeking financing and enough money to finance only 1,000.
someone must choose.
why should we automatically assume a government bureaucracy will make better decisions than thousands of investors, companies, universities, charities, foundations and philanthropists risking their own resources?
markets aren’t perfect.
neither are governments.
the difference is that decentralized capital allows many people to make different bets simultaneously.
one investor can be wrong without forcing everyone else to make the same mistake.
what about science that doesn’t make money?
this is the strongest argument for government funding for science, and it deserves to be taken seriously.
some research may have enormous benefits for humanity but little immediate commercial value.
a mathematician might spend decades studying something that appears useless. Fifty years later, those equations could become essential to computing, cryptography or physics.
why would a company pay for that?
sometimes it wouldn’t.
economists call this a positive externality: society may receive benefits that the person paying for the research cannot capture financially.
but recognizing a market problem doesn’t automatically prove that government funding is the best solution.
there are alternatives:
- university endowments can finance fundamental research.
- philanthropic foundations can support long-term scientific projects.
- wealthy individuals can become modern scientific patrons.
- companies can maintain long-term research laboratories.
- industry associations can pool research resources.
- scientific prizes can reward breakthroughs.
- nonprofit research institutes can specialize in basic science.
- crowdfunding can allow thousands of individuals to support research they consider valuable.
- charities can finance research into diseases and other humanitarian problems.
human beings have financed art, universities, churches, museums, hospitals, expeditions and scientific institutions voluntarily for centuries.
there is no reason to assume that generosity, curiosity and ambition disappear simply because government stops writing the checks.
imagine a new generation of scientific patrons
this is where i think reducing government funding could create something unexpectedly positive.
imagine billionaires competing not merely to own bigger yachts but to cure alzheimer’s disease.
imagine foundations financing mathematicians for 20 years without demanding commercially useful results.
imagine technology companies rebuilding institutions resembling the great industrial laboratories of the twentieth century.
imagine universities competing for private endowments by demonstrating the quality of their research.
imagine scientific entrepreneurs pitching ambitious research projects to investors and philanthropists.
and imagine thousands of different funding sources instead of researchers worrying about the priorities of washington.
that ecosystem would certainly look different from today’s system.
different doesn’t necessarily mean worse.
failure is information
there is another important difference between private and government capital.
private organizations that repeatedly allocate resources badly eventually lose money, donors or investors.
that feedback mechanism is imperfect, but it exists.
government programs don’t face the same discipline.
a failed government program can receive another appropriation.
an ineffective agency can argue that its failure proves it needs a larger budget.
politicians are spending other people’s money, which weakens the feedback mechanism between decisions and consequences.
scientific research necessarily involves failure. Most experiments won’t transform civilization.
the important question is whether the institutions allocating resources learn from those failures.
government should fund its legitimate responsibilities
i wouldn’t argue that government can never finance scientific research under any circumstances.
there is an important distinction.
government shouldn’t finance science simply because science is beneficial. It should finance research only when that research is necessary to perform a legitimate function of government.
if national defense is a legitimate government responsibility, military research necessary for national defense can reasonably be part of that responsibility.
the same principle could apply to other narrowly defined government functions.
but “scientific research produces benefits” isn’t enough.
food produces benefits. Housing produces benefits. Computers produce benefits. Books produce benefits.
we don’t conclude that government therefore needs to produce all food, build all houses, manufacture all computers or publish all books.
why should science automatically be different?
what would happen if washington stopped writing the checks?
this is ultimately an empirical question.
if washington dramatically reduced government funding for science, some laboratories would close. Some researchers would lose jobs. Some projects would disappear.
the transition would be painful.
but that isn’t the end of the story.
resources don’t disappear when government stops taxing and spending them. They remain in the private economy.
universities would have incentives to seek donors.
scientists would have incentives to find new patrons.
companies would recruit researchers.
foundations would identify neglected fields.
entrepreneurs would build new research organizations.
wealthy individuals looking to leave a legacy could finance scientific institutions.
perhaps we would even witness the rebirth of institutions resembling bell labs.
the transition would involve experimentation and failure.
that’s precisely how decentralized systems discover better institutions.
science doesn’t need government money
the debate over government funding for science is too often framed as a choice between government funding and scientific ignorance.
i reject that choice.
i believe deeply in science precisely because i believe human curiosity, ambition, generosity and entrepreneurship are stronger than government bureaucracy.
galileo found patrons.
scientific societies found members.
universities built endowments.
philanthropists created research institutes.
corporations created industrial laboratories.
entrepreneurs created entirely new industries.
human beings wanted to understand the universe long before federal research grants existed, and they will continue wanting to understand it regardless of what happens to washington’s budget.
so here’s the question worth asking:
if washington stopped writing the checks, would american science collapse—or would a new ecosystem of private science emerge?
i would like to find out.
science is too important to depend on politics.
frequently asked questions
does science need government funding?
scientific research needs resources, but those resources don’t necessarily have to come from government. Companies, universities, foundations, philanthropists, nonprofit organizations and investors can all finance scientific research.
has the private sector produced important scientific discoveries?
yes. Industrial research laboratories have produced major breakthroughs. Bell labs researchers developed the transistor and made fundamental discoveries including cosmic microwave background radiation, while ibm researchers developed the scanning tunneling microscope.
who would pay for basic research without government funding?
possible sources include university endowments, charitable foundations, wealthy philanthropists, corporations, nonprofit research institutes, industry partnerships, scientific prizes and individual donors. The difficult question is whether these sources would finance enough basic research, which is one of the strongest arguments for continued government funding.
should government ever fund scientific research?
government research can be justified when it is directly necessary for a legitimate government responsibility. For example, if national defense is a proper function of government, research directly necessary for national defense can logically fall within that responsibility. |
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| First 5 Alameda County Celebrates First Year of Measure Cs Implementation |
| Posted on Thursday, August 20 @ 00:01:53 PDT (0 reads) | |
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Black press
first 5 alameda county celebrates first year of measure c’s implementation
measure c, a community-led and voter-approved half-cent sales tax, was designed to generate approximately $150 million annually for early care and education. During its first year, the initiative reached more than 20,000 children and supported more than 6,400 early educators and caregivers throughout the county.
first 5 alameda county marked the first anniversary of the impact of measure c with a community celebration friday, aug. 7, at children’s fairyland in oakland, highlighting more than $135 million invested to strengthen early childhood education, families and caregivers across alameda county.
the celebration brought together families, educators, caregivers, advocates, elected officials and community leaders for an evening of music, cultural performances, and children’s activities.
“oakland is on the move,” said oakland mayor barbara lee, commending all the advocates who helped win the victory for early childhood education and their providers.
measure c, a community-led and voter-approved half-cent sales tax, was designed to generate approximately $150 million annually for early care and education. During its first year, the initiative reached more than 20,000 children and supported more than 6,400 early educators and caregivers throughout the county.
first 5 alameda county ceo kristin spanos said, “in the first 10 months of measure c being available after the board of supervisors adopted the 5-year plan, we’ve had over $135 million put directly into the community supporting children and providers with emergency grants, investments, and stipends.”
first 5 alameda county, the public agency responsible for administering measure c, focused on quickly moving voter-approved dollars into local communities while developing partnerships, accountability measures, and infrastructure intended to create long-term impact.
alameda county district 5 supervisor nikki fortunato bas: “we’re celebrating the first year of getting money into families’ pockets and childcare providers’ pockets. This is about deploying very vital resources over the course of five years. It’s a billion-dollar impact.”
community advisory council member nancy harvey said, “we are totally excited. It was a 10-year fight, and we fought tooth and nail. We had so much support from county supervisors nate miley and nikki fortunato bas, the unions, and the late supervisor wilma chan. This is a historic event – people are watching measure c all over the nation.”
harvey explained that small childcare providers received a $40,000 grant, and larger providers received a $50,000 grant.
childcare advocate and provider lisa zarodney of livermore said, “when i got my emergency funds, i was about to close. The stipend allowed me to continue through 2026 and get all the babies on my wait list.”
in business for 27 years, zarodney said she is now caring for the children of past clients.
“i couldn’t continue my legacy, my dream, and my passion without the funding from measure c.”
harvey emphasized that he next leg of the fight is to ensure workers have a sustainable wage.
“we are now pushing to raise the wage of workers to $25 to keep doors open and people employed,” she said.
first 5 alameda county’s vision is to build an integrated and equity-centered early childhood system supporting children, families, and communities regardless of race, income, or neighborhood. As administrator of measure c, the agency has worked to expand access to early care and education, strengthen family stability, and support the providers and caregivers families rely upon.
through measure c and partnerships with initiatives including the oakland children’s initiative, first 5 alameda county has sought to reduce fragmented services and better coordinate public resources.
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black press
from palestine to oakland: seeds for liberation examines shared struggles for freedom
the screening was hosted by the east bay democratic socialists of america and the dr. Huey p. Newton foundation. Following the film, director matthew solomon joined local community leaders for a discussion about solidarity, resistance, and the historical connections explored throughout the documentary.
community members gathered at the black panther party museum on saturday, aug. 15, in downtown oakland for a screening of “seeds for liberation,” an award-winning documentary examining the palestinian liberation movement and its connections to black, chicano and other movements for collective liberation.
the film reveals the face of conflict, struggle, and injustice today and yesterday. In one scene, a bleeding child pleads for help on a shell-shattered rooftop after a bombing in the gaza strip last year. In another scene, newly freed nelson mandela addresses thousands at the oakland coliseum in 1990, at the end of apartheid.
the screening was hosted by the east bay democratic socialists of america and the dr. Huey p. Newton foundation. Following the film, director matthew solomon joined local community leaders for a discussion about solidarity, resistance, and the historical connections explored throughout the documentary.
directed by solomon and executive-produced by donna hadjikhani and alana hadid, “seeds for liberation” situates palestinian experiences within the broader history of anti-imperialist and decolonial movements.
through interviews with historians, legal scholars, activists and organizers, the documentary examines palestinian resistance. It also details the role of social media in shaping the public’s understanding of the impact of palestine’s 77-year occupation by israeli forces, events in gaza and the west bank, and relationships between liberation movements across generations and geographic boundaries.
the film includes perspectives of people connected to the black liberation army, la raza unida and the stop cop city movement. Those featured talk about colonialism, u.S. Foreign policy, policing, racial justice and their views of what solidarity with palestinians has meant.
solomon developed the documentary following his previous film, “reimagining safety,” which explored alternatives to traditional policing.
“i use film as a medium to connect personal testimony with larger social and political questions,” said solomon, who is currently touring the film across the nation as well as canada and other countries.
executive producer hadjikhani brought a personal connection to the project. An iranian american designer and social justice advocate, she traveled to gaza and the west bank as a college student in 1993 during the first intifada. Hadid has since focused on palestinian stories and other underrepresented voices.
the oakland screening carried added historical significance because it was held in the black panther party museum, where the history of black resistance and community organizing provided a backdrop for the film’s examination of interconnected struggles.
activist and artist cat brooks passionately spoke about the fight for the freedom of all people. “No one is free until everyone is free,” she said.
brooks played a key role in the struggle for justice for oscar grant, who was gunned down by a bart police officer in 2009 and is co-founder of the anti police-terror project (aptp), whose mission is to rapidly respond to and ultimately eradicate state violence in communities of color.
rather than treating liberation movements as isolated chapters, “seeds for liberation” asks audiences to consider how movements separated by time, race and geography have influenced one another and how solidarity has continued to evolve across generations.
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black press
at sacramento summit, becerra discusses policy; uses “family” metaphor to frame case for national political unity
“we’re a state. We’re a family. We all work together,” becerra said, arguing that california’s challenges require cooperation rather than partisan blame. He added that, as governor, he would have to work with lawmakers “whether they’ve got a d or an r behind their name.”
california gubernatorial candidate xavier becerra is positioning himself as a results-driven democrat willing to work across party lines, laying out an agenda focused on affordability, health care, housing, energy and technology at a sacramento summit last week.
[in a conversation] with politico california bureau chief melanie mason, the former california attorney general and u.S. Health secretary pushed back on republican criticism that democrats bear responsibility for california’s persistent housing, homelessness and affordability problems.
“we’re a state. We’re a family. We all work together,” becerra said, arguing that california’s challenges require cooperation rather than partisan blame. He added that, as governor, he would have to work with lawmakers “whether they’ve got a d or an r behind their name.”
the approach reflects becerra’s broader campaign argument that voters are looking for results rather than ideological promises. He pointed to his experience handling crises and negotiating lower prescription drug prices as evidence that he can deliver, while rejecting what he called “pie in the sky, inflated promises.”
that philosophy is reflected in his housing proposal. Becerra says he wants to accelerate construction by reducing regulatory delays and creating greater certainty for developers, but declined to promise three million new homes, calling that an “inflated promise.” He also pledged to expand programs that help californians purchase their first homes.
health care is another major component of his platform. With federal cuts threatening coverage for californians, becerra proposed making the state a “backstop” so residents do not lose insurance. His plan would seek savings from administrative waste and require insurers and providers to help reduce costs.
on energy, becerra unveiled his “power hour” concept: two hours of free electricity, initially aimed at lower-income households, during periods of excess solar generation. The proposal would encourage californians to shift energy use to the afternoon, when solar production is high.
becerra also supports requiring larger employers to contribute more when workers rely on publicly funded health programs, arguing that taxpayers should not subsidize companies that fail to provide affordable coverage.
on climate policy, he said california’s 2035 goal for phasing out new gas-powered cars is achievable if the state invests in charging infrastructure. He also wants stronger guardrails for artificial intelligence, particularly to protect children and workers, while keeping california at the center of the technology industry.
the candidate also addressed the proposed paramount-skydance merger, saying the state should consider whether the deal would keep hollywood’s entertainment industry vibrant and protect working families.
on taxes, becerra opposes the specific billionaires tax proposal on the ballot but maintains that wealthy californians should pay their fair share. He also rejected the idea that democrats face an “existential crisis,” arguing that different ideological factions can strengthen the party if they focus on delivering results.
black history
gov. Newsom nominates 3 black women judges to serve on state courts of appeal
justices adams, hippach and juliet macaulay are among eight appellate court nominees recently announced by newsom. The governor also appointed nine superior court judges across five counties.
gov. Gavin newsom nominated three black women — justice rashida adams and judges denise hippach and juliet macaulay — to serve on the california courts of appeal.
justices adams, hippach and juliet macaulay are among eight appellate court nominees recently announced by newsom. The governor also appointed nine superior court judges across five counties.
adams, of los angeles county, was nominated as presiding justice of the second district court of appeal, division three. She has served as an associate justice on the court since 2023 and previously served as a los angeles county superior court judge from 2017 to 2023.
adams, who earned her law degree from yale law school, would succeed retired justice lee edmon. Her term would begin jan. 4, 2027, subject to voter confirmation in the nov. 3 general election.
hippach, of san luis obispo county, was nominated as an associate justice of the second district court of appeal, division six. She has served on the santa barbara county superior court since 2022 and previously worked in county counsel, attorney general, district attorney and appellate counsel offices. She earned her law degree from the university of southern california gould school of law.
macaulay, of orange county, was nominated as an associate justice of the fourth district court of appeal, division three. She has served on the orange county superior court since 2022.
previously, she was chief administrative law judge at the california department of social services and held several positions with the california board of parole hearings. She earned her law degree from the university of ibadan.
newsom’s other appellate nominees are david sapp and judge lauri damrell for the third district; judges marsha amin and lisa rodriguez for the fourth district, division one; and judge frederick chung for the sixth district.
the governor also appointed justin ford, erin murphy, wilson park and maricela segura to the los angeles county superior court; timothy mulhere in riverside county; and crystal salumbides and brigid campo in san diego county.
david kim received an interim appointment in sonoma county, and phoebe maffei received an interim appointment in san francisco county.
the appellate nominations require confirmation by the commission on judicial appointments. Each appellate position pays $280,052 annually, while the superior court positions pay $244,727.
black press
trial judge recused from karmelo anthony case
blackpressusa—the judge who presided over karmelo anthony’s murder trial has been recused as anthony’s attorneys prepare to argue that courtroom restrictions and other alleged errors denied him a fair trial.
by emilie st. John
the trial judge who presided over the karmelo anthony trial has been recused from the matter in a ruling issued on august 19.
abc news reported that roach imposed a gag order in the case and barred any electronics from the courtroom during the proceedings due to the attention it had garnered.
during the wednesday hearing, defense attorney russell wilson argued that roach “gave public comment about an impending proceeding,” which should be an “automatic recusal,” according to abc dallas affiliate wfaa.
prosecutor bill wirskye argued that roach did nothing wrong and alleged a “concerted effort from social media and influencers to disrupt” the high-profile trial, according to wfaa.
judge sid harle granted the defense motion to recuse judge john roach from any further matters in the anthony case.
judge harle is no stranger to high-profile cases, having presided over the prosecution of a police officer charged in connection with the 2022 mass shooting at robb elementary school in uvalde.
the collin county district attorney’s office continues to defend its handling of the case by issuing a statement to nbc 5 dfw.
“the defendant’s new lawyers have filed a motion containing several inaccurate characterizations of the trial proceedings. The entire prosecution team and i conducted this trial ethically and in full compliance with the court’s rulings and any agreements with defense counsel. We look forward to addressing these claims thoroughly in a court of law in the coming weeks. The jury heard extensive evidence over the course of the trial and returned a unanimous verdict. We remain confident in that verdict and the fairness of the proceedings.”
anthony’s new legal team, made up of appellate, civil rights, and criminal defense attorneys, was retained following anthony’s conviction.
“our responsibility is to determine whether a legal error occurred and to ensure that every issue supported by the record is fully and vigorously presented on appeal,” the team said in a statement.
“we recognize the profound loss suffered by one young man’s family and the uncertainty facing another, and we extend our respect to everyone whose lives have been forever changed by these events,” the release reads.
anthony was charged with the stabbing death of austin metcalf during a track meet in frisco, texas, on april 2, 2025. Anthony has long maintained it was an act of self-defense.
several witnesses testified that anthony was asked to leave the tent about 15 times. Some witnesses recalled anthony saying, “touch me and see what happens,” during the altercation. Another witness quoted metcalf as telling anthony, “i’m not going to fight you.”
witnesses also recounted that metcalf shoved or nudged anthony, who was sitting on the bleachers, before anthony stabbed him with a pocket knife, according to abc news. The blade perforated metcalf’s right ventricle, and he was pronounced dead after being transported to an area hospital.
anthony was convicted on june 9 of the murder of austin metcalf and sentenced to 35 years in prison.
black history
commentary: what two fathers talk about at lunch
milwaukee community journal — black fathers are often subject to longstanding negative stereotypes about their involvement in their children’s lives. However, historical records, including newspaper advertisements from the slavery era, reveal enslaved men frequently risked severe punishment to try and reunite with their families, disproving notions of disinterest or abandonment.
the slander against black fathers is as old as the country. The men who owned us knew better. So does modern social science.
last week i had lunch with an old friend.
he is a black republican and a popular commentator, which means we have spent twenty years disagreeing in public and liking each other in private. He would be welcome in any barbershop in america. He keeps it real in the way men in any true community require of one another.
we talked about our kids. That was most of the lunch.
nothing about that would surprise any black man reading this. Nothing about it would surprise most black people.
but every black father carries something else around with him. We know the stereotypes: that we do not stay, that we do not provide, that we are not there.
those stories are as old as the country itself.
so is the proof against them. And the proof was written down by the men who owned us.
in november of 1836, a man named richard escaped near morganton, north carolina. He got away while the brother of the man who claimed him was hauling him to alabama.
the enslaver bought newspaper space to get him back. His advertisement did not guess where richard was headed. It told readers exactly where to look.
richard had a wife, a free woman of color named jane tucker. She was arranging to return to raleigh. The ad said there was no doubt her husband would try to get to her.
the man who owned richard was not speculating. He put money behind it. He had seen enough men run toward a wife or a child to know where to send the search party. He expected his readers to know it too.
historians have been collecting those advertisements for years. The freedom on the move project indexes close to ninety thousand. They name wives. They name children. They name the road the man was likely taking to reach them.
capture meant brutal punishment. Escape itself could be deadly. They ran anyway.
they did not wait for the war to end, either.
on december 27, 1862, henry christian placed a notice in a philadelphia newspaper. He was searching for richard, rebecca, and rachel christian. His children. Last known to be traveling out of winchester, virginia.
historians at villanova university have recovered nearly five thousand notices like it. Freed people paying for newspaper space, year after year, hunting for family sold away. Judith giesberg, who leads that project, estimates the success rate may have been as low as 2 in 100.
they kept paying anyway.
many of those notices were placed by men. Fathers. Husbands. Brothers.
herbert gutman went through the records community by community. In the places he studied, most black families had both parents at home. In some rural areas, it ran above eight in ten.
now come forward to our own time.
among fathers living with their small children, black fathers were the most likely of the groups the study counted to bathe, dress, and change them every day. Seventy percent did. For white fathers, 60 percent. For hispanic fathers, 45.
among fathers of school-age children, 41 percent of black fathers helped with homework or checked it daily. For white fathers, 28 percent.
that study covered 2006 to 2010. It is still the most recent we have, because the government stopped asking.
a later look at federal data, from 2017 to 2019, found the pattern holds for fathers living apart from their children. Nearly six in ten black fathers saw their children weekly. For white fathers, about four in ten.
that survey also has the hard number, and i will not skip it. Forty-three percent of black fathers have at least one child living somewhere else. For white fathers it is 14.
that is not a shortage of men who want to father. Black fathers who live with their children are among the most involved in this country. The ones living apart report showing up more than anybody.
something keeps pulling them out of the house.
work left those neighborhoods. Violence rose. Prisons filled. Researchers have spent forty years untangling how the three feed one another.
none of it is new. None of it is only ours. It hit black neighborhoods first and hardest, then kept going until it reached everybody.
next week i will show you those numbers. They belong to every man in america.
my friend and i did not talk about any of this over lunch. We talked about our kids.
that is what fathers do.
ben jealous is a professor of practice at the university of pennsylvania and former president and ceo of the naacp.
based on reporting by milwaukee community journal.
black press
commentary: property is power! The last generation to start from zero
michigan chronicle — the article explores the concept of becoming the last generation to start from zero, challenging traditional american definitions of achievement that focus on individual progress within a single lifetime.
perhaps success is becoming the last generation that has to start from zero.
i have been thinking about that idea lately because it challenges something deeply embedded in the american definition of achievement. We tend to measure progress by how far a person travels in a single lifetime, the neighborhood they escaped, the degree they earned, the profession they entered, the income they eventually commanded. For black americans especially, there is understandable pride attached to being first the first in the family to graduate from college, to become a doctor, to own a business, to buy a home, to reach the executive suite.
but what happens after the first?
that question interests me more than the achievement itself.
because there is another form of success that receives considerably less attention: creating a family in which being first eventually becomes unnecessary.
a child who inherits a stable home does not begin where their parents began. A young entrepreneur whose family owns a commercial building approaches risk differently from one whose first obligation is paying rent. A college graduate who leaves school without having to financially rescue the generation before him has choices that another equally talented graduate may not have. A family that owns land, businesses, investments, or income-producing property possesses something more consequential than money. They possess a different starting point.
we like to imagine america primarily as a meritocracy of finish lines. Work hard enough, become educated enough, make the correct decisions, and eventually you will arrive. There is truth in that, but wealth operates according to another logic; wealth is deeply influenced by where the race begins.
an inheritance does not have to arrive as a million-dollar check; sometimes, inheritance is simply the absence of a burden.
it is graduating without debt, it is living in a family-owned property while starting a business, it is receiving $30,000 toward a first home, it is having parents who can help rather than parents who require help, it is inheriting a duplex with a mortgage nearly paid off, a piece of land purchased decades earlier, shares in a family business, or simply the knowledge of how money works. None of those advantages guarantees success, but they create room for it.
we talk about wealth as though its principal benefit is a larger house, a better automobile, better vacations, and a more comfortable retirement. But the deeper value of wealth is optionality. Wealth gives people the ability to make decisions based on opportunity rather than immediate necessity.
a person with assets can sometimes afford to wait; they can turn down the wrong job; they can survive a business failure; they can relocate for an opportunity; they can help a child with a down payment; they can think in decades because not every decision has to be solved by friday.
the federal reserve’s most recent comprehensive survey of consumer finances found that the typical white family held roughly six times the wealth of the typical black family in 2022. There was encouraging movement beneath that number: black ownership of homes, stocks, and businesses increased, but the underlying disparity remained enormous.
there is another number that helps explain why these gaps can be so stubborn. Federal reserve research found that nearly 30 percent of white families had received an inheritance or substantial gift, compared with about 10 percent of black families, and among families receiving inheritance, white families tended to receive larger amounts.
that difference is not merely about what one generation receives. It affects what that generation is capable of leaving; this is where the mathematics of legacy becomes unforgiving.
a family that inherits capital can invest sooner. A family that invests sooner benefits from more years of appreciation and compounding. Those assets can then become collateral for additional assets. A house can produce equity that helps purchase another property. A business can finance another enterprise. Land acquired before development arrives can become valuable decades later. Capital creates the possibility of additional capital.
meanwhile, the family, beginning with nothing, may be doing everything right and still spend its most productive years building the foundation another family will inherit. That is why income alone cannot tell us whether a family is becoming wealthy.
there are black households today earning incomes their grandparents could scarcely have imagined. That is genuine progress. But a household earning $200,000 while building few transferable assets may ultimately leave less economic power behind than a household earning considerably less, spending 30 years acquiring property, investments and businesses.
the distinction becomes especially important now because america is approaching an extraordinary economic transition. Cerulli associates now estimates that roughly $124 trillion could transfer between generations and to charities between 2024 and 2048, an increase from its earlier $84 trillion projection. Rising values of financial assets and real estate are major reasons the estimate has grown so dramatically.
think about what that actually means.
while much of america is discussing wages, inflation, interest rates, and affordability and understandably so another economy is operating quietly underneath it. Houses purchased in 1987 are becoming inheritances. Businesses started in 1994 are changing hands. Stock portfolios accumulated over 40 years are being transferred to children. Land purchased when nobody wanted it now sits in the path of development.
it changes how we think about the family home. Perhaps the first instinct should not always be to sell grandma’s house and divide the proceeds. Sometimes the more important question is whether that property can remain an asset. It changes how entrepreneurs think about real estate. If you operate the same business in the same neighborhood for twenty years, should the next generation inherit only the business or the building beneath it?
it changes how we think about land. Some property does not need to produce an immediate return to have strategic value. Sometimes patience itself is the investment. It even changes how we think about lifestyle. There is nothing inherently wrong with enjoying the fruits of one’s labor. Wealth without living is merely accumulation. But there is a difference between enjoying success and consuming all evidence that success ever occurred.
an abundance mindset is sometimes misunderstood as simply believing there is enough opportunity for everyone. I think it requires something more demanding: believing that my economic decisions should extend beyond my own lifetime.
that means replacing some short-term questions with longer ones.
not merely, can i afford this, but what will this become?
not merely, how much do i make, but how much of what i make becomes ownership?
not merely, what can i buy, but what can i build that remains after me?
property belongs at the center of that philosophy, but property should be understood broadly. A home matters. So does a rental property, a business, land, intellectual property, equities, and ownership in enterprises that can appreciate and transfer. The objective is not to worship real estate. The objective is to understand the difference between earning money and converting a portion of that money into things that can outlive the person who earned it.
at roughly half a percent of black america’s population, we are talking about hundreds of thousands of people. If those households began accumulating even one additional meaningful asset – a home, rental property, parcel of land, business interest or investment portfolio – the immediate effect would matter, but the more interesting effect would not appear on next year’s balance sheet.
it would appear 20 or 30 years from now.
children would inherit property instead of merely photographs of the house where their grandparents once lived. Young entrepreneurs would inherit capital along with ambition. Families would enter difficult economic periods with assets they could borrow against, rather than with the desperation they had to borrow through. Some children would still fail; others would squander opportunities; there are no guarantees in capitalism or in families.
for generations, black america understandably celebrated how far we had traveled from where history placed us. There is another stage of economic maturity, however, in which progress is measured not only by distance traveled but by how much of that distance the next generation does not have to travel again.
that is legacy.
legacy is not the amount of money people remember you having. It is the amount of struggle your decisions made unnecessary for someone who came after you. The goal is not to raise children who never have to work. Work has dignity, discipline, and purpose. The goal is to raise generations whose work can begin at a higher level because someone before them has laid the foundation.
maybe your grandparents couldn’t do it.
maybe your parents didn’t know how.
maybe circumstances required that everything they earned simply be used to survive.
but somebody eventually has to interrupt the pattern.
somebody buys the first property.
somebody keeps the land.
somebody starts the company.
somebody creates the estate plan.
to live well, certainly. To accomplish something meaningful, absolutely. But also to reach the end of one’s economic life knowing that the people coming behind us will have problems of their own to solve just not all of ours.
perhaps success is becoming the last generation that has to start from zero, and perhaps property is power is ultimately about making certain that once a family finally builds something worth keeping, it never has to start from nothing again.
property is power!
property is power! Is a movement to promote home and community ownership. Studies indicate homeownership leads to higher graduation rates, family wealth, and community involvement.
based on reporting by michigan chronicle. |
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| Singapore Largest Bank $169 Billion DBS Started Search for New Chairman in Succe |
| Posted on Thursday, August 20 @ 00:01:53 PDT (0 reads) | |
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Singapore largest bank $169 billion dbs started search for new chairman in succession planning for 16-year chairman peter seah (age 79) since appointment in 2010, peter seah board roles include gic & singapore airlines (chairman) and is member of singapore council of presidential advisers, dbs current market value at $169 billion, share price +34.2% ytd, +51.3% last 12 months & +176% last 5 years 20th august 2026 | hong kong
singapore largest bank dbs ($169 billion market value) has started search for a new dbs chairman in succession planning for 16-year chairman peter seah (age 79) since appointment in 2010. Peter seah board roles include gic & singapore airlines (chairman), and is a member of singapore council of presidential advisers. Dbs current market value at $169 billio n, share price +34.2% ytd, +51.3% last 12 months & +176% last 5 years. Peter seah – mr. Peter seah joined the board of directors of dbs group holdings ltd and dbs bank ltd on 16 november 2009 and assumed the role of chairman on 1 may 2010. He is chairman of the board executive committee, as well as a member of the audit committee, board risk management committee, board technology committee, compensation and management development committee and nominating committee. In addition, he is chairman of dbs bank (hong kong) limited. Peter is the present chairman of singapore airlines limited and lasalle college of the arts limited. Peter was a banker for 33 years before retiring as vice chairman and ceo of the former overseas union bank in 2001. Peter serves on the boards of gic private limited and the university of the arts singapore ltd. He is a member of the council of presidential advisers and the chairman of the national wages council. Peter received the public service medal (pingat bakti masyarakat) in the 1995 national day awards in recognition of his contribution to social and community services. He was awarded the public service star (bintang bakti masyarakat) in the 1999 national day awards for his role as chairman of the sub-committee on finance and banking, committee on singapore’s competitiveness. Peter was also awarded the distinguished service order in the 2012 national day awards. He was bestowed the order of nila utama (distinction), one of singapore’s highest honours, for his contributions to the nation in the 2021 national day awards.
“ singapore largest bank $169 billion dbs started search for new chairman in succession planning for 16-year chairman peter seah (age 79) since appointment in 2010, peter seah board roles include gic & singapore airlines (chairman) and is member of singapore council of presidential advisers, dbs current market value at $169 billion, share price +34.2% ytd, +51.3% last 12 months & +176% last 5 years “
singapore largest bank $169 billion dbs started search for new chairman in succession planning for 16-year chairman peter seah (age 79) since appointment in 2010, peter seah board roles include gic & singapore airlines (chairman) and is member of singapore council of presidential advisers, dbs current market value at $169 billion, share price +34.2% ytd, +51.3% last 12 months & +176% last 5 years dbs singapore |
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| From Palestine to Oakland: Seeds for Liberation Examines Shared Struggles for Fr |
| Posted on Thursday, August 20 @ 00:01:53 PDT (0 reads) | |
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Black press
from palestine to oakland: seeds for liberation examines shared struggles for freedom
the screening was hosted by the east bay democratic socialists of america and the dr. Huey p. Newton foundation. Following the film, director matthew solomon joined local community leaders for a discussion about solidarity, resistance, and the historical connections explored throughout the documentary.
community members gathered at the black panther party museum on saturday, aug. 15, in downtown oakland for a screening of “seeds for liberation,” an award-winning documentary examining the palestinian liberation movement and its connections to black, chicano and other movements for collective liberation.
the film reveals the face of conflict, struggle, and injustice today and yesterday. In one scene, a bleeding child pleads for help on a shell-shattered rooftop after a bombing in the gaza strip last year. In another scene, newly freed nelson mandela addresses thousands at the oakland coliseum in 1990, at the end of apartheid.
the screening was hosted by the east bay democratic socialists of america and the dr. Huey p. Newton foundation. Following the film, director matthew solomon joined local community leaders for a discussion about solidarity, resistance, and the historical connections explored throughout the documentary.
directed by solomon and executive-produced by donna hadjikhani and alana hadid, “seeds for liberation” situates palestinian experiences within the broader history of anti-imperialist and decolonial movements.
through interviews with historians, legal scholars, activists and organizers, the documentary examines palestinian resistance. It also details the role of social media in shaping the public’s understanding of the impact of palestine’s 77-year occupation by israeli forces, events in gaza and the west bank, and relationships between liberation movements across generations and geographic boundaries.
the film includes perspectives of people connected to the black liberation army, la raza unida and the stop cop city movement. Those featured talk about colonialism, u.S. Foreign policy, policing, racial justice and their views of what solidarity with palestinians has meant.
solomon developed the documentary following his previous film, “reimagining safety,” which explored alternatives to traditional policing.
“i use film as a medium to connect personal testimony with larger social and political questions,” said solomon, who is currently touring the film across the nation as well as canada and other countries.
executive producer hadjikhani brought a personal connection to the project. An iranian american designer and social justice advocate, she traveled to gaza and the west bank as a college student in 1993 during the first intifada. Hadid has since focused on palestinian stories and other underrepresented voices.
the oakland screening carried added historical significance because it was held in the black panther party museum, where the history of black resistance and community organizing provided a backdrop for the film’s examination of interconnected struggles.
activist and artist cat brooks passionately spoke about the fight for the freedom of all people. “No one is free until everyone is free,” she said.
brooks played a key role in the struggle for justice for oscar grant, who was gunned down by a bart police officer in 2009 and is co-founder of the anti police-terror project (aptp), whose mission is to rapidly respond to and ultimately eradicate state violence in communities of color.
rather than treating liberation movements as isolated chapters, “seeds for liberation” asks audiences to consider how movements separated by time, race and geography have influenced one another and how solidarity has continued to evolve across generations.
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black press
first 5 alameda county celebrates first year of measure c’s implementation
measure c, a community-led and voter-approved half-cent sales tax, was designed to generate approximately $150 million annually for early care and education. During its first year, the initiative reached more than 20,000 children and supported more than 6,400 early educators and caregivers throughout the county.
first 5 alameda county marked the first anniversary of the impact of measure c with a community celebration friday, aug. 7, at children’s fairyland in oakland, highlighting more than $135 million invested to strengthen early childhood education, families and caregivers across alameda county.
the celebration brought together families, educators, caregivers, advocates, elected officials and community leaders for an evening of music, cultural performances, and children’s activities.
“oakland is on the move,” said oakland mayor barbara lee, commending all the advocates who helped win the victory for early childhood education and their providers.
measure c, a community-led and voter-approved half-cent sales tax, was designed to generate approximately $150 million annually for early care and education. During its first year, the initiative reached more than 20,000 children and supported more than 6,400 early educators and caregivers throughout the county.
first 5 alameda county ceo kristin spanos said, “in the first 10 months of measure c being available after the board of supervisors adopted the 5-year plan, we’ve had over $135 million put directly into the community supporting children and providers with emergency grants, investments, and stipends.”
first 5 alameda county, the public agency responsible for administering measure c, focused on quickly moving voter-approved dollars into local communities while developing partnerships, accountability measures, and infrastructure intended to create long-term impact.
alameda county district 5 supervisor nikki fortunato bas: “we’re celebrating the first year of getting money into families’ pockets and childcare providers’ pockets. This is about deploying very vital resources over the course of five years. It’s a billion-dollar impact.”
community advisory council member nancy harvey said, “we are totally excited. It was a 10-year fight, and we fought tooth and nail. We had so much support from county supervisors nate miley and nikki fortunato bas, the unions, and the late supervisor wilma chan. This is a historic event – people are watching measure c all over the nation.”
harvey explained that small childcare providers received a $40,000 grant, and larger providers received a $50,000 grant.
childcare advocate and provider lisa zarodney of livermore said, “when i got my emergency funds, i was about to close. The stipend allowed me to continue through 2026 and get all the babies on my wait list.”
in business for 27 years, zarodney said she is now caring for the children of past clients.
“i couldn’t continue my legacy, my dream, and my passion without the funding from measure c.”
harvey emphasized that he next leg of the fight is to ensure workers have a sustainable wage.
“we are now pushing to raise the wage of workers to $25 to keep doors open and people employed,” she said.
first 5 alameda county’s vision is to build an integrated and equity-centered early childhood system supporting children, families, and communities regardless of race, income, or neighborhood. As administrator of measure c, the agency has worked to expand access to early care and education, strengthen family stability, and support the providers and caregivers families rely upon.
through measure c and partnerships with initiatives including the oakland children’s initiative, first 5 alameda county has sought to reduce fragmented services and better coordinate public resources.
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black press
at sacramento summit, becerra discusses policy; uses “family” metaphor to frame case for national political unity
“we’re a state. We’re a family. We all work together,” becerra said, arguing that california’s challenges require cooperation rather than partisan blame. He added that, as governor, he would have to work with lawmakers “whether they’ve got a d or an r behind their name.”
california gubernatorial candidate xavier becerra is positioning himself as a results-driven democrat willing to work across party lines, laying out an agenda focused on affordability, health care, housing, energy and technology at a sacramento summit last week.
[in a conversation] with politico california bureau chief melanie mason, the former california attorney general and u.S. Health secretary pushed back on republican criticism that democrats bear responsibility for california’s persistent housing, homelessness and affordability problems.
“we’re a state. We’re a family. We all work together,” becerra said, arguing that california’s challenges require cooperation rather than partisan blame. He added that, as governor, he would have to work with lawmakers “whether they’ve got a d or an r behind their name.”
the approach reflects becerra’s broader campaign argument that voters are looking for results rather than ideological promises. He pointed to his experience handling crises and negotiating lower prescription drug prices as evidence that he can deliver, while rejecting what he called “pie in the sky, inflated promises.”
that philosophy is reflected in his housing proposal. Becerra says he wants to accelerate construction by reducing regulatory delays and creating greater certainty for developers, but declined to promise three million new homes, calling that an “inflated promise.” He also pledged to expand programs that help californians purchase their first homes.
health care is another major component of his platform. With federal cuts threatening coverage for californians, becerra proposed making the state a “backstop” so residents do not lose insurance. His plan would seek savings from administrative waste and require insurers and providers to help reduce costs.
on energy, becerra unveiled his “power hour” concept: two hours of free electricity, initially aimed at lower-income households, during periods of excess solar generation. The proposal would encourage californians to shift energy use to the afternoon, when solar production is high.
becerra also supports requiring larger employers to contribute more when workers rely on publicly funded health programs, arguing that taxpayers should not subsidize companies that fail to provide affordable coverage.
on climate policy, he said california’s 2035 goal for phasing out new gas-powered cars is achievable if the state invests in charging infrastructure. He also wants stronger guardrails for artificial intelligence, particularly to protect children and workers, while keeping california at the center of the technology industry.
the candidate also addressed the proposed paramount-skydance merger, saying the state should consider whether the deal would keep hollywood’s entertainment industry vibrant and protect working families.
on taxes, becerra opposes the specific billionaires tax proposal on the ballot but maintains that wealthy californians should pay their fair share. He also rejected the idea that democrats face an “existential crisis,” arguing that different ideological factions can strengthen the party if they focus on delivering results.
black history
gov. Newsom nominates 3 black women judges to serve on state courts of appeal
justices adams, hippach and juliet macaulay are among eight appellate court nominees recently announced by newsom. The governor also appointed nine superior court judges across five counties.
gov. Gavin newsom nominated three black women — justice rashida adams and judges denise hippach and juliet macaulay — to serve on the california courts of appeal.
justices adams, hippach and juliet macaulay are among eight appellate court nominees recently announced by newsom. The governor also appointed nine superior court judges across five counties.
adams, of los angeles county, was nominated as presiding justice of the second district court of appeal, division three. She has served as an associate justice on the court since 2023 and previously served as a los angeles county superior court judge from 2017 to 2023.
adams, who earned her law degree from yale law school, would succeed retired justice lee edmon. Her term would begin jan. 4, 2027, subject to voter confirmation in the nov. 3 general election.
hippach, of san luis obispo county, was nominated as an associate justice of the second district court of appeal, division six. She has served on the santa barbara county superior court since 2022 and previously worked in county counsel, attorney general, district attorney and appellate counsel offices. She earned her law degree from the university of southern california gould school of law.
macaulay, of orange county, was nominated as an associate justice of the fourth district court of appeal, division three. She has served on the orange county superior court since 2022.
previously, she was chief administrative law judge at the california department of social services and held several positions with the california board of parole hearings. She earned her law degree from the university of ibadan.
newsom’s other appellate nominees are david sapp and judge lauri damrell for the third district; judges marsha amin and lisa rodriguez for the fourth district, division one; and judge frederick chung for the sixth district.
the governor also appointed justin ford, erin murphy, wilson park and maricela segura to the los angeles county superior court; timothy mulhere in riverside county; and crystal salumbides and brigid campo in san diego county.
david kim received an interim appointment in sonoma county, and phoebe maffei received an interim appointment in san francisco county.
the appellate nominations require confirmation by the commission on judicial appointments. Each appellate position pays $280,052 annually, while the superior court positions pay $244,727.
black press
trial judge recused from karmelo anthony case
blackpressusa—the judge who presided over karmelo anthony’s murder trial has been recused as anthony’s attorneys prepare to argue that courtroom restrictions and other alleged errors denied him a fair trial.
by emilie st. John
the trial judge who presided over the karmelo anthony trial has been recused from the matter in a ruling issued on august 19.
abc news reported that roach imposed a gag order in the case and barred any electronics from the courtroom during the proceedings due to the attention it had garnered.
during the wednesday hearing, defense attorney russell wilson argued that roach “gave public comment about an impending proceeding,” which should be an “automatic recusal,” according to abc dallas affiliate wfaa.
prosecutor bill wirskye argued that roach did nothing wrong and alleged a “concerted effort from social media and influencers to disrupt” the high-profile trial, according to wfaa.
judge sid harle granted the defense motion to recuse judge john roach from any further matters in the anthony case.
judge harle is no stranger to high-profile cases, having presided over the prosecution of a police officer charged in connection with the 2022 mass shooting at robb elementary school in uvalde.
the collin county district attorney’s office continues to defend its handling of the case by issuing a statement to nbc 5 dfw.
“the defendant’s new lawyers have filed a motion containing several inaccurate characterizations of the trial proceedings. The entire prosecution team and i conducted this trial ethically and in full compliance with the court’s rulings and any agreements with defense counsel. We look forward to addressing these claims thoroughly in a court of law in the coming weeks. The jury heard extensive evidence over the course of the trial and returned a unanimous verdict. We remain confident in that verdict and the fairness of the proceedings.”
anthony’s new legal team, made up of appellate, civil rights, and criminal defense attorneys, was retained following anthony’s conviction.
“our responsibility is to determine whether a legal error occurred and to ensure that every issue supported by the record is fully and vigorously presented on appeal,” the team said in a statement.
“we recognize the profound loss suffered by one young man’s family and the uncertainty facing another, and we extend our respect to everyone whose lives have been forever changed by these events,” the release reads.
anthony was charged with the stabbing death of austin metcalf during a track meet in frisco, texas, on april 2, 2025. Anthony has long maintained it was an act of self-defense.
several witnesses testified that anthony was asked to leave the tent about 15 times. Some witnesses recalled anthony saying, “touch me and see what happens,” during the altercation. Another witness quoted metcalf as telling anthony, “i’m not going to fight you.”
witnesses also recounted that metcalf shoved or nudged anthony, who was sitting on the bleachers, before anthony stabbed him with a pocket knife, according to abc news. The blade perforated metcalf’s right ventricle, and he was pronounced dead after being transported to an area hospital.
anthony was convicted on june 9 of the murder of austin metcalf and sentenced to 35 years in prison.
black history
commentary: what two fathers talk about at lunch
milwaukee community journal — black fathers are often subject to longstanding negative stereotypes about their involvement in their children’s lives. However, historical records, including newspaper advertisements from the slavery era, reveal enslaved men frequently risked severe punishment to try and reunite with their families, disproving notions of disinterest or abandonment.
the slander against black fathers is as old as the country. The men who owned us knew better. So does modern social science.
last week i had lunch with an old friend.
he is a black republican and a popular commentator, which means we have spent twenty years disagreeing in public and liking each other in private. He would be welcome in any barbershop in america. He keeps it real in the way men in any true community require of one another.
we talked about our kids. That was most of the lunch.
nothing about that would surprise any black man reading this. Nothing about it would surprise most black people.
but every black father carries something else around with him. We know the stereotypes: that we do not stay, that we do not provide, that we are not there.
those stories are as old as the country itself.
so is the proof against them. And the proof was written down by the men who owned us.
in november of 1836, a man named richard escaped near morganton, north carolina. He got away while the brother of the man who claimed him was hauling him to alabama.
the enslaver bought newspaper space to get him back. His advertisement did not guess where richard was headed. It told readers exactly where to look.
richard had a wife, a free woman of color named jane tucker. She was arranging to return to raleigh. The ad said there was no doubt her husband would try to get to her.
the man who owned richard was not speculating. He put money behind it. He had seen enough men run toward a wife or a child to know where to send the search party. He expected his readers to know it too.
historians have been collecting those advertisements for years. The freedom on the move project indexes close to ninety thousand. They name wives. They name children. They name the road the man was likely taking to reach them.
capture meant brutal punishment. Escape itself could be deadly. They ran anyway.
they did not wait for the war to end, either.
on december 27, 1862, henry christian placed a notice in a philadelphia newspaper. He was searching for richard, rebecca, and rachel christian. His children. Last known to be traveling out of winchester, virginia.
historians at villanova university have recovered nearly five thousand notices like it. Freed people paying for newspaper space, year after year, hunting for family sold away. Judith giesberg, who leads that project, estimates the success rate may have been as low as 2 in 100.
they kept paying anyway.
many of those notices were placed by men. Fathers. Husbands. Brothers.
herbert gutman went through the records community by community. In the places he studied, most black families had both parents at home. In some rural areas, it ran above eight in ten.
now come forward to our own time.
among fathers living with their small children, black fathers were the most likely of the groups the study counted to bathe, dress, and change them every day. Seventy percent did. For white fathers, 60 percent. For hispanic fathers, 45.
among fathers of school-age children, 41 percent of black fathers helped with homework or checked it daily. For white fathers, 28 percent.
that study covered 2006 to 2010. It is still the most recent we have, because the government stopped asking.
a later look at federal data, from 2017 to 2019, found the pattern holds for fathers living apart from their children. Nearly six in ten black fathers saw their children weekly. For white fathers, about four in ten.
that survey also has the hard number, and i will not skip it. Forty-three percent of black fathers have at least one child living somewhere else. For white fathers it is 14.
that is not a shortage of men who want to father. Black fathers who live with their children are among the most involved in this country. The ones living apart report showing up more than anybody.
something keeps pulling them out of the house.
work left those neighborhoods. Violence rose. Prisons filled. Researchers have spent forty years untangling how the three feed one another.
none of it is new. None of it is only ours. It hit black neighborhoods first and hardest, then kept going until it reached everybody.
next week i will show you those numbers. They belong to every man in america.
my friend and i did not talk about any of this over lunch. We talked about our kids.
that is what fathers do.
ben jealous is a professor of practice at the university of pennsylvania and former president and ceo of the naacp.
based on reporting by milwaukee community journal.
black press
commentary: property is power! The last generation to start from zero
michigan chronicle — the article explores the concept of becoming the last generation to start from zero, challenging traditional american definitions of achievement that focus on individual progress within a single lifetime.
perhaps success is becoming the last generation that has to start from zero.
i have been thinking about that idea lately because it challenges something deeply embedded in the american definition of achievement. We tend to measure progress by how far a person travels in a single lifetime, the neighborhood they escaped, the degree they earned, the profession they entered, the income they eventually commanded. For black americans especially, there is understandable pride attached to being first the first in the family to graduate from college, to become a doctor, to own a business, to buy a home, to reach the executive suite.
but what happens after the first?
that question interests me more than the achievement itself.
because there is another form of success that receives considerably less attention: creating a family in which being first eventually becomes unnecessary.
a child who inherits a stable home does not begin where their parents began. A young entrepreneur whose family owns a commercial building approaches risk differently from one whose first obligation is paying rent. A college graduate who leaves school without having to financially rescue the generation before him has choices that another equally talented graduate may not have. A family that owns land, businesses, investments, or income-producing property possesses something more consequential than money. They possess a different starting point.
we like to imagine america primarily as a meritocracy of finish lines. Work hard enough, become educated enough, make the correct decisions, and eventually you will arrive. There is truth in that, but wealth operates according to another logic; wealth is deeply influenced by where the race begins.
an inheritance does not have to arrive as a million-dollar check; sometimes, inheritance is simply the absence of a burden.
it is graduating without debt, it is living in a family-owned property while starting a business, it is receiving $30,000 toward a first home, it is having parents who can help rather than parents who require help, it is inheriting a duplex with a mortgage nearly paid off, a piece of land purchased decades earlier, shares in a family business, or simply the knowledge of how money works. None of those advantages guarantees success, but they create room for it.
we talk about wealth as though its principal benefit is a larger house, a better automobile, better vacations, and a more comfortable retirement. But the deeper value of wealth is optionality. Wealth gives people the ability to make decisions based on opportunity rather than immediate necessity.
a person with assets can sometimes afford to wait; they can turn down the wrong job; they can survive a business failure; they can relocate for an opportunity; they can help a child with a down payment; they can think in decades because not every decision has to be solved by friday.
the federal reserve’s most recent comprehensive survey of consumer finances found that the typical white family held roughly six times the wealth of the typical black family in 2022. There was encouraging movement beneath that number: black ownership of homes, stocks, and businesses increased, but the underlying disparity remained enormous.
there is another number that helps explain why these gaps can be so stubborn. Federal reserve research found that nearly 30 percent of white families had received an inheritance or substantial gift, compared with about 10 percent of black families, and among families receiving inheritance, white families tended to receive larger amounts.
that difference is not merely about what one generation receives. It affects what that generation is capable of leaving; this is where the mathematics of legacy becomes unforgiving.
a family that inherits capital can invest sooner. A family that invests sooner benefits from more years of appreciation and compounding. Those assets can then become collateral for additional assets. A house can produce equity that helps purchase another property. A business can finance another enterprise. Land acquired before development arrives can become valuable decades later. Capital creates the possibility of additional capital.
meanwhile, the family, beginning with nothing, may be doing everything right and still spend its most productive years building the foundation another family will inherit. That is why income alone cannot tell us whether a family is becoming wealthy.
there are black households today earning incomes their grandparents could scarcely have imagined. That is genuine progress. But a household earning $200,000 while building few transferable assets may ultimately leave less economic power behind than a household earning considerably less, spending 30 years acquiring property, investments and businesses.
the distinction becomes especially important now because america is approaching an extraordinary economic transition. Cerulli associates now estimates that roughly $124 trillion could transfer between generations and to charities between 2024 and 2048, an increase from its earlier $84 trillion projection. Rising values of financial assets and real estate are major reasons the estimate has grown so dramatically.
think about what that actually means.
while much of america is discussing wages, inflation, interest rates, and affordability and understandably so another economy is operating quietly underneath it. Houses purchased in 1987 are becoming inheritances. Businesses started in 1994 are changing hands. Stock portfolios accumulated over 40 years are being transferred to children. Land purchased when nobody wanted it now sits in the path of development.
it changes how we think about the family home. Perhaps the first instinct should not always be to sell grandma’s house and divide the proceeds. Sometimes the more important question is whether that property can remain an asset. It changes how entrepreneurs think about real estate. If you operate the same business in the same neighborhood for twenty years, should the next generation inherit only the business or the building beneath it?
it changes how we think about land. Some property does not need to produce an immediate return to have strategic value. Sometimes patience itself is the investment. It even changes how we think about lifestyle. There is nothing inherently wrong with enjoying the fruits of one’s labor. Wealth without living is merely accumulation. But there is a difference between enjoying success and consuming all evidence that success ever occurred.
an abundance mindset is sometimes misunderstood as simply believing there is enough opportunity for everyone. I think it requires something more demanding: believing that my economic decisions should extend beyond my own lifetime.
that means replacing some short-term questions with longer ones.
not merely, can i afford this, but what will this become?
not merely, how much do i make, but how much of what i make becomes ownership?
not merely, what can i buy, but what can i build that remains after me?
property belongs at the center of that philosophy, but property should be understood broadly. A home matters. So does a rental property, a business, land, intellectual property, equities, and ownership in enterprises that can appreciate and transfer. The objective is not to worship real estate. The objective is to understand the difference between earning money and converting a portion of that money into things that can outlive the person who earned it.
at roughly half a percent of black america’s population, we are talking about hundreds of thousands of people. If those households began accumulating even one additional meaningful asset – a home, rental property, parcel of land, business interest or investment portfolio – the immediate effect would matter, but the more interesting effect would not appear on next year’s balance sheet.
it would appear 20 or 30 years from now.
children would inherit property instead of merely photographs of the house where their grandparents once lived. Young entrepreneurs would inherit capital along with ambition. Families would enter difficult economic periods with assets they could borrow against, rather than with the desperation they had to borrow through. Some children would still fail; others would squander opportunities; there are no guarantees in capitalism or in families.
for generations, black america understandably celebrated how far we had traveled from where history placed us. There is another stage of economic maturity, however, in which progress is measured not only by distance traveled but by how much of that distance the next generation does not have to travel again.
that is legacy.
legacy is not the amount of money people remember you having. It is the amount of struggle your decisions made unnecessary for someone who came after you. The goal is not to raise children who never have to work. Work has dignity, discipline, and purpose. The goal is to raise generations whose work can begin at a higher level because someone before them has laid the foundation.
maybe your grandparents couldn’t do it.
maybe your parents didn’t know how.
maybe circumstances required that everything they earned simply be used to survive.
but somebody eventually has to interrupt the pattern.
somebody buys the first property.
somebody keeps the land.
somebody starts the company.
somebody creates the estate plan.
to live well, certainly. To accomplish something meaningful, absolutely. But also to reach the end of one’s economic life knowing that the people coming behind us will have problems of their own to solve just not all of ours.
perhaps success is becoming the last generation that has to start from zero, and perhaps property is power is ultimately about making certain that once a family finally builds something worth keeping, it never has to start from nothing again.
property is power!
property is power! Is a movement to promote home and community ownership. Studies indicate homeownership leads to higher graduation rates, family wealth, and community involvement.
based on reporting by michigan chronicle. |
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| At Sacramento Summit, Becerra Discusses Policy; Uses Family Metaphor to Frame Ca |
| Posted on Thursday, August 20 @ 00:01:53 PDT (0 reads) | |
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Black press
at sacramento summit, becerra discusses policy; uses “family” metaphor to frame case for national political unity
“we’re a state. We’re a family. We all work together,” becerra said, arguing that california’s challenges require cooperation rather than partisan blame. He added that, as governor, he would have to work with lawmakers “whether they’ve got a d or an r behind their name.”
california gubernatorial candidate xavier becerra is positioning himself as a results-driven democrat willing to work across party lines, laying out an agenda focused on affordability, health care, housing, energy and technology at a sacramento summit last week.
[in a conversation] with politico california bureau chief melanie mason, the former california attorney general and u.S. Health secretary pushed back on republican criticism that democrats bear responsibility for california’s persistent housing, homelessness and affordability problems.
“we’re a state. We’re a family. We all work together,” becerra said, arguing that california’s challenges require cooperation rather than partisan blame. He added that, as governor, he would have to work with lawmakers “whether they’ve got a d or an r behind their name.”
the approach reflects becerra’s broader campaign argument that voters are looking for results rather than ideological promises. He pointed to his experience handling crises and negotiating lower prescription drug prices as evidence that he can deliver, while rejecting what he called “pie in the sky, inflated promises.”
that philosophy is reflected in his housing proposal. Becerra says he wants to accelerate construction by reducing regulatory delays and creating greater certainty for developers, but declined to promise three million new homes, calling that an “inflated promise.” He also pledged to expand programs that help californians purchase their first homes.
health care is another major component of his platform. With federal cuts threatening coverage for californians, becerra proposed making the state a “backstop” so residents do not lose insurance. His plan would seek savings from administrative waste and require insurers and providers to help reduce costs.
on energy, becerra unveiled his “power hour” concept: two hours of free electricity, initially aimed at lower-income households, during periods of excess solar generation. The proposal would encourage californians to shift energy use to the afternoon, when solar production is high.
becerra also supports requiring larger employers to contribute more when workers rely on publicly funded health programs, arguing that taxpayers should not subsidize companies that fail to provide affordable coverage.
on climate policy, he said california’s 2035 goal for phasing out new gas-powered cars is achievable if the state invests in charging infrastructure. He also wants stronger guardrails for artificial intelligence, particularly to protect children and workers, while keeping california at the center of the technology industry.
the candidate also addressed the proposed paramount-skydance merger, saying the state should consider whether the deal would keep hollywood’s entertainment industry vibrant and protect working families.
on taxes, becerra opposes the specific billionaires tax proposal on the ballot but maintains that wealthy californians should pay their fair share. He also rejected the idea that democrats face an “existential crisis,” arguing that different ideological factions can strengthen the party if they focus on delivering results.
black press
first 5 alameda county celebrates first year of measure c’s implementation
measure c, a community-led and voter-approved half-cent sales tax, was designed to generate approximately $150 million annually for early care and education. During its first year, the initiative reached more than 20,000 children and supported more than 6,400 early educators and caregivers throughout the county.
first 5 alameda county marked the first anniversary of the impact of measure c with a community celebration friday, aug. 7, at children’s fairyland in oakland, highlighting more than $135 million invested to strengthen early childhood education, families and caregivers across alameda county.
the celebration brought together families, educators, caregivers, advocates, elected officials and community leaders for an evening of music, cultural performances, and children’s activities.
“oakland is on the move,” said oakland mayor barbara lee, commending all the advocates who helped win the victory for early childhood education and their providers.
measure c, a community-led and voter-approved half-cent sales tax, was designed to generate approximately $150 million annually for early care and education. During its first year, the initiative reached more than 20,000 children and supported more than 6,400 early educators and caregivers throughout the county.
first 5 alameda county ceo kristin spanos said, “in the first 10 months of measure c being available after the board of supervisors adopted the 5-year plan, we’ve had over $135 million put directly into the community supporting children and providers with emergency grants, investments, and stipends.”
first 5 alameda county, the public agency responsible for administering measure c, focused on quickly moving voter-approved dollars into local communities while developing partnerships, accountability measures, and infrastructure intended to create long-term impact.
alameda county district 5 supervisor nikki fortunato bas: “we’re celebrating the first year of getting money into families’ pockets and childcare providers’ pockets. This is about deploying very vital resources over the course of five years. It’s a billion-dollar impact.”
community advisory council member nancy harvey said, “we are totally excited. It was a 10-year fight, and we fought tooth and nail. We had so much support from county supervisors nate miley and nikki fortunato bas, the unions, and the late supervisor wilma chan. This is a historic event – people are watching measure c all over the nation.”
harvey explained that small childcare providers received a $40,000 grant, and larger providers received a $50,000 grant.
childcare advocate and provider lisa zarodney of livermore said, “when i got my emergency funds, i was about to close. The stipend allowed me to continue through 2026 and get all the babies on my wait list.”
in business for 27 years, zarodney said she is now caring for the children of past clients.
“i couldn’t continue my legacy, my dream, and my passion without the funding from measure c.”
harvey emphasized that he next leg of the fight is to ensure workers have a sustainable wage.
“we are now pushing to raise the wage of workers to $25 to keep doors open and people employed,” she said.
first 5 alameda county’s vision is to build an integrated and equity-centered early childhood system supporting children, families, and communities regardless of race, income, or neighborhood. As administrator of measure c, the agency has worked to expand access to early care and education, strengthen family stability, and support the providers and caregivers families rely upon.
through measure c and partnerships with initiatives including the oakland children’s initiative, first 5 alameda county has sought to reduce fragmented services and better coordinate public resources.
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black press
from palestine to oakland: seeds for liberation examines shared struggles for freedom
the screening was hosted by the east bay democratic socialists of america and the dr. Huey p. Newton foundation. Following the film, director matthew solomon joined local community leaders for a discussion about solidarity, resistance, and the historical connections explored throughout the documentary.
community members gathered at the black panther party museum on saturday, aug. 15, in downtown oakland for a screening of “seeds for liberation,” an award-winning documentary examining the palestinian liberation movement and its connections to black, chicano and other movements for collective liberation.
the film reveals the face of conflict, struggle, and injustice today and yesterday. In one scene, a bleeding child pleads for help on a shell-shattered rooftop after a bombing in the gaza strip last year. In another scene, newly freed nelson mandela addresses thousands at the oakland coliseum in 1990, at the end of apartheid.
the screening was hosted by the east bay democratic socialists of america and the dr. Huey p. Newton foundation. Following the film, director matthew solomon joined local community leaders for a discussion about solidarity, resistance, and the historical connections explored throughout the documentary.
directed by solomon and executive-produced by donna hadjikhani and alana hadid, “seeds for liberation” situates palestinian experiences within the broader history of anti-imperialist and decolonial movements.
through interviews with historians, legal scholars, activists and organizers, the documentary examines palestinian resistance. It also details the role of social media in shaping the public’s understanding of the impact of palestine’s 77-year occupation by israeli forces, events in gaza and the west bank, and relationships between liberation movements across generations and geographic boundaries.
the film includes perspectives of people connected to the black liberation army, la raza unida and the stop cop city movement. Those featured talk about colonialism, u.S. Foreign policy, policing, racial justice and their views of what solidarity with palestinians has meant.
solomon developed the documentary following his previous film, “reimagining safety,” which explored alternatives to traditional policing.
“i use film as a medium to connect personal testimony with larger social and political questions,” said solomon, who is currently touring the film across the nation as well as canada and other countries.
executive producer hadjikhani brought a personal connection to the project. An iranian american designer and social justice advocate, she traveled to gaza and the west bank as a college student in 1993 during the first intifada. Hadid has since focused on palestinian stories and other underrepresented voices.
the oakland screening carried added historical significance because it was held in the black panther party museum, where the history of black resistance and community organizing provided a backdrop for the film’s examination of interconnected struggles.
activist and artist cat brooks passionately spoke about the fight for the freedom of all people. “No one is free until everyone is free,” she said.
brooks played a key role in the struggle for justice for oscar grant, who was gunned down by a bart police officer in 2009 and is co-founder of the anti police-terror project (aptp), whose mission is to rapidly respond to and ultimately eradicate state violence in communities of color.
rather than treating liberation movements as isolated chapters, “seeds for liberation” asks audiences to consider how movements separated by time, race and geography have influenced one another and how solidarity has continued to evolve across generations.
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black history
gov. Newsom nominates 3 black women judges to serve on state courts of appeal
justices adams, hippach and juliet macaulay are among eight appellate court nominees recently announced by newsom. The governor also appointed nine superior court judges across five counties.
gov. Gavin newsom nominated three black women — justice rashida adams and judges denise hippach and juliet macaulay — to serve on the california courts of appeal.
justices adams, hippach and juliet macaulay are among eight appellate court nominees recently announced by newsom. The governor also appointed nine superior court judges across five counties.
adams, of los angeles county, was nominated as presiding justice of the second district court of appeal, division three. She has served as an associate justice on the court since 2023 and previously served as a los angeles county superior court judge from 2017 to 2023.
adams, who earned her law degree from yale law school, would succeed retired justice lee edmon. Her term would begin jan. 4, 2027, subject to voter confirmation in the nov. 3 general election.
hippach, of san luis obispo county, was nominated as an associate justice of the second district court of appeal, division six. She has served on the santa barbara county superior court since 2022 and previously worked in county counsel, attorney general, district attorney and appellate counsel offices. She earned her law degree from the university of southern california gould school of law.
macaulay, of orange county, was nominated as an associate justice of the fourth district court of appeal, division three. She has served on the orange county superior court since 2022.
previously, she was chief administrative law judge at the california department of social services and held several positions with the california board of parole hearings. She earned her law degree from the university of ibadan.
newsom’s other appellate nominees are david sapp and judge lauri damrell for the third district; judges marsha amin and lisa rodriguez for the fourth district, division one; and judge frederick chung for the sixth district.
the governor also appointed justin ford, erin murphy, wilson park and maricela segura to the los angeles county superior court; timothy mulhere in riverside county; and crystal salumbides and brigid campo in san diego county.
david kim received an interim appointment in sonoma county, and phoebe maffei received an interim appointment in san francisco county.
the appellate nominations require confirmation by the commission on judicial appointments. Each appellate position pays $280,052 annually, while the superior court positions pay $244,727.
black press
trial judge recused from karmelo anthony case
blackpressusa—the judge who presided over karmelo anthony’s murder trial has been recused as anthony’s attorneys prepare to argue that courtroom restrictions and other alleged errors denied him a fair trial.
by emilie st. John
the trial judge who presided over the karmelo anthony trial has been recused from the matter in a ruling issued on august 19.
abc news reported that roach imposed a gag order in the case and barred any electronics from the courtroom during the proceedings due to the attention it had garnered.
during the wednesday hearing, defense attorney russell wilson argued that roach “gave public comment about an impending proceeding,” which should be an “automatic recusal,” according to abc dallas affiliate wfaa.
prosecutor bill wirskye argued that roach did nothing wrong and alleged a “concerted effort from social media and influencers to disrupt” the high-profile trial, according to wfaa.
judge sid harle granted the defense motion to recuse judge john roach from any further matters in the anthony case.
judge harle is no stranger to high-profile cases, having presided over the prosecution of a police officer charged in connection with the 2022 mass shooting at robb elementary school in uvalde.
the collin county district attorney’s office continues to defend its handling of the case by issuing a statement to nbc 5 dfw.
“the defendant’s new lawyers have filed a motion containing several inaccurate characterizations of the trial proceedings. The entire prosecution team and i conducted this trial ethically and in full compliance with the court’s rulings and any agreements with defense counsel. We look forward to addressing these claims thoroughly in a court of law in the coming weeks. The jury heard extensive evidence over the course of the trial and returned a unanimous verdict. We remain confident in that verdict and the fairness of the proceedings.”
anthony’s new legal team, made up of appellate, civil rights, and criminal defense attorneys, was retained following anthony’s conviction.
“our responsibility is to determine whether a legal error occurred and to ensure that every issue supported by the record is fully and vigorously presented on appeal,” the team said in a statement.
“we recognize the profound loss suffered by one young man’s family and the uncertainty facing another, and we extend our respect to everyone whose lives have been forever changed by these events,” the release reads.
anthony was charged with the stabbing death of austin metcalf during a track meet in frisco, texas, on april 2, 2025. Anthony has long maintained it was an act of self-defense.
several witnesses testified that anthony was asked to leave the tent about 15 times. Some witnesses recalled anthony saying, “touch me and see what happens,” during the altercation. Another witness quoted metcalf as telling anthony, “i’m not going to fight you.”
witnesses also recounted that metcalf shoved or nudged anthony, who was sitting on the bleachers, before anthony stabbed him with a pocket knife, according to abc news. The blade perforated metcalf’s right ventricle, and he was pronounced dead after being transported to an area hospital.
anthony was convicted on june 9 of the murder of austin metcalf and sentenced to 35 years in prison.
black history
commentary: what two fathers talk about at lunch
milwaukee community journal — black fathers are often subject to longstanding negative stereotypes about their involvement in their children’s lives. However, historical records, including newspaper advertisements from the slavery era, reveal enslaved men frequently risked severe punishment to try and reunite with their families, disproving notions of disinterest or abandonment.
the slander against black fathers is as old as the country. The men who owned us knew better. So does modern social science.
last week i had lunch with an old friend.
he is a black republican and a popular commentator, which means we have spent twenty years disagreeing in public and liking each other in private. He would be welcome in any barbershop in america. He keeps it real in the way men in any true community require of one another.
we talked about our kids. That was most of the lunch.
nothing about that would surprise any black man reading this. Nothing about it would surprise most black people.
but every black father carries something else around with him. We know the stereotypes: that we do not stay, that we do not provide, that we are not there.
those stories are as old as the country itself.
so is the proof against them. And the proof was written down by the men who owned us.
in november of 1836, a man named richard escaped near morganton, north carolina. He got away while the brother of the man who claimed him was hauling him to alabama.
the enslaver bought newspaper space to get him back. His advertisement did not guess where richard was headed. It told readers exactly where to look.
richard had a wife, a free woman of color named jane tucker. She was arranging to return to raleigh. The ad said there was no doubt her husband would try to get to her.
the man who owned richard was not speculating. He put money behind it. He had seen enough men run toward a wife or a child to know where to send the search party. He expected his readers to know it too.
historians have been collecting those advertisements for years. The freedom on the move project indexes close to ninety thousand. They name wives. They name children. They name the road the man was likely taking to reach them.
capture meant brutal punishment. Escape itself could be deadly. They ran anyway.
they did not wait for the war to end, either.
on december 27, 1862, henry christian placed a notice in a philadelphia newspaper. He was searching for richard, rebecca, and rachel christian. His children. Last known to be traveling out of winchester, virginia.
historians at villanova university have recovered nearly five thousand notices like it. Freed people paying for newspaper space, year after year, hunting for family sold away. Judith giesberg, who leads that project, estimates the success rate may have been as low as 2 in 100.
they kept paying anyway.
many of those notices were placed by men. Fathers. Husbands. Brothers.
herbert gutman went through the records community by community. In the places he studied, most black families had both parents at home. In some rural areas, it ran above eight in ten.
now come forward to our own time.
among fathers living with their small children, black fathers were the most likely of the groups the study counted to bathe, dress, and change them every day. Seventy percent did. For white fathers, 60 percent. For hispanic fathers, 45.
among fathers of school-age children, 41 percent of black fathers helped with homework or checked it daily. For white fathers, 28 percent.
that study covered 2006 to 2010. It is still the most recent we have, because the government stopped asking.
a later look at federal data, from 2017 to 2019, found the pattern holds for fathers living apart from their children. Nearly six in ten black fathers saw their children weekly. For white fathers, about four in ten.
that survey also has the hard number, and i will not skip it. Forty-three percent of black fathers have at least one child living somewhere else. For white fathers it is 14.
that is not a shortage of men who want to father. Black fathers who live with their children are among the most involved in this country. The ones living apart report showing up more than anybody.
something keeps pulling them out of the house.
work left those neighborhoods. Violence rose. Prisons filled. Researchers have spent forty years untangling how the three feed one another.
none of it is new. None of it is only ours. It hit black neighborhoods first and hardest, then kept going until it reached everybody.
next week i will show you those numbers. They belong to every man in america.
my friend and i did not talk about any of this over lunch. We talked about our kids.
that is what fathers do.
ben jealous is a professor of practice at the university of pennsylvania and former president and ceo of the naacp.
based on reporting by milwaukee community journal.
black press
commentary: property is power! The last generation to start from zero
michigan chronicle — the article explores the concept of becoming the last generation to start from zero, challenging traditional american definitions of achievement that focus on individual progress within a single lifetime.
perhaps success is becoming the last generation that has to start from zero.
i have been thinking about that idea lately because it challenges something deeply embedded in the american definition of achievement. We tend to measure progress by how far a person travels in a single lifetime, the neighborhood they escaped, the degree they earned, the profession they entered, the income they eventually commanded. For black americans especially, there is understandable pride attached to being first the first in the family to graduate from college, to become a doctor, to own a business, to buy a home, to reach the executive suite.
but what happens after the first?
that question interests me more than the achievement itself.
because there is another form of success that receives considerably less attention: creating a family in which being first eventually becomes unnecessary.
a child who inherits a stable home does not begin where their parents began. A young entrepreneur whose family owns a commercial building approaches risk differently from one whose first obligation is paying rent. A college graduate who leaves school without having to financially rescue the generation before him has choices that another equally talented graduate may not have. A family that owns land, businesses, investments, or income-producing property possesses something more consequential than money. They possess a different starting point.
we like to imagine america primarily as a meritocracy of finish lines. Work hard enough, become educated enough, make the correct decisions, and eventually you will arrive. There is truth in that, but wealth operates according to another logic; wealth is deeply influenced by where the race begins.
an inheritance does not have to arrive as a million-dollar check; sometimes, inheritance is simply the absence of a burden.
it is graduating without debt, it is living in a family-owned property while starting a business, it is receiving $30,000 toward a first home, it is having parents who can help rather than parents who require help, it is inheriting a duplex with a mortgage nearly paid off, a piece of land purchased decades earlier, shares in a family business, or simply the knowledge of how money works. None of those advantages guarantees success, but they create room for it.
we talk about wealth as though its principal benefit is a larger house, a better automobile, better vacations, and a more comfortable retirement. But the deeper value of wealth is optionality. Wealth gives people the ability to make decisions based on opportunity rather than immediate necessity.
a person with assets can sometimes afford to wait; they can turn down the wrong job; they can survive a business failure; they can relocate for an opportunity; they can help a child with a down payment; they can think in decades because not every decision has to be solved by friday.
the federal reserve’s most recent comprehensive survey of consumer finances found that the typical white family held roughly six times the wealth of the typical black family in 2022. There was encouraging movement beneath that number: black ownership of homes, stocks, and businesses increased, but the underlying disparity remained enormous.
there is another number that helps explain why these gaps can be so stubborn. Federal reserve research found that nearly 30 percent of white families had received an inheritance or substantial gift, compared with about 10 percent of black families, and among families receiving inheritance, white families tended to receive larger amounts.
that difference is not merely about what one generation receives. It affects what that generation is capable of leaving; this is where the mathematics of legacy becomes unforgiving.
a family that inherits capital can invest sooner. A family that invests sooner benefits from more years of appreciation and compounding. Those assets can then become collateral for additional assets. A house can produce equity that helps purchase another property. A business can finance another enterprise. Land acquired before development arrives can become valuable decades later. Capital creates the possibility of additional capital.
meanwhile, the family, beginning with nothing, may be doing everything right and still spend its most productive years building the foundation another family will inherit. That is why income alone cannot tell us whether a family is becoming wealthy.
there are black households today earning incomes their grandparents could scarcely have imagined. That is genuine progress. But a household earning $200,000 while building few transferable assets may ultimately leave less economic power behind than a household earning considerably less, spending 30 years acquiring property, investments and businesses.
the distinction becomes especially important now because america is approaching an extraordinary economic transition. Cerulli associates now estimates that roughly $124 trillion could transfer between generations and to charities between 2024 and 2048, an increase from its earlier $84 trillion projection. Rising values of financial assets and real estate are major reasons the estimate has grown so dramatically.
think about what that actually means.
while much of america is discussing wages, inflation, interest rates, and affordability and understandably so another economy is operating quietly underneath it. Houses purchased in 1987 are becoming inheritances. Businesses started in 1994 are changing hands. Stock portfolios accumulated over 40 years are being transferred to children. Land purchased when nobody wanted it now sits in the path of development.
it changes how we think about the family home. Perhaps the first instinct should not always be to sell grandma’s house and divide the proceeds. Sometimes the more important question is whether that property can remain an asset. It changes how entrepreneurs think about real estate. If you operate the same business in the same neighborhood for twenty years, should the next generation inherit only the business or the building beneath it?
it changes how we think about land. Some property does not need to produce an immediate return to have strategic value. Sometimes patience itself is the investment. It even changes how we think about lifestyle. There is nothing inherently wrong with enjoying the fruits of one’s labor. Wealth without living is merely accumulation. But there is a difference between enjoying success and consuming all evidence that success ever occurred.
an abundance mindset is sometimes misunderstood as simply believing there is enough opportunity for everyone. I think it requires something more demanding: believing that my economic decisions should extend beyond my own lifetime.
that means replacing some short-term questions with longer ones.
not merely, can i afford this, but what will this become?
not merely, how much do i make, but how much of what i make becomes ownership?
not merely, what can i buy, but what can i build that remains after me?
property belongs at the center of that philosophy, but property should be understood broadly. A home matters. So does a rental property, a business, land, intellectual property, equities, and ownership in enterprises that can appreciate and transfer. The objective is not to worship real estate. The objective is to understand the difference between earning money and converting a portion of that money into things that can outlive the person who earned it.
at roughly half a percent of black america’s population, we are talking about hundreds of thousands of people. If those households began accumulating even one additional meaningful asset – a home, rental property, parcel of land, business interest or investment portfolio – the immediate effect would matter, but the more interesting effect would not appear on next year’s balance sheet.
it would appear 20 or 30 years from now.
children would inherit property instead of merely photographs of the house where their grandparents once lived. Young entrepreneurs would inherit capital along with ambition. Families would enter difficult economic periods with assets they could borrow against, rather than with the desperation they had to borrow through. Some children would still fail; others would squander opportunities; there are no guarantees in capitalism or in families.
for generations, black america understandably celebrated how far we had traveled from where history placed us. There is another stage of economic maturity, however, in which progress is measured not only by distance traveled but by how much of that distance the next generation does not have to travel again.
that is legacy.
legacy is not the amount of money people remember you having. It is the amount of struggle your decisions made unnecessary for someone who came after you. The goal is not to raise children who never have to work. Work has dignity, discipline, and purpose. The goal is to raise generations whose work can begin at a higher level because someone before them has laid the foundation.
maybe your grandparents couldn’t do it.
maybe your parents didn’t know how.
maybe circumstances required that everything they earned simply be used to survive.
but somebody eventually has to interrupt the pattern.
somebody buys the first property.
somebody keeps the land.
somebody starts the company.
somebody creates the estate plan.
to live well, certainly. To accomplish something meaningful, absolutely. But also to reach the end of one’s economic life knowing that the people coming behind us will have problems of their own to solve just not all of ours.
perhaps success is becoming the last generation that has to start from zero, and perhaps property is power is ultimately about making certain that once a family finally builds something worth keeping, it never has to start from nothing again.
property is power!
property is power! Is a movement to promote home and community ownership. Studies indicate homeownership leads to higher graduation rates, family wealth, and community involvement.
based on reporting by michigan chronicle. |
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| Rundoo Raises $30M Series B |
| Posted on Thursday, August 20 @ 00:01:53 PDT (0 reads) | |
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Rundoo raises $30m series b
rundoo raises $30m series b led by battery ventures to expand its ai platform for independent hardware, paint, and building supply stores.
rundoo raises $30m series b
rundoo, a redwood city, california-based technology company that provides an ai-first system of record for independent supply stores, has raised $30 million in series b financing. This latest round brings the companys total funding to $48 million.
investors
this round was led by battery ventures, with participation from existing investors bessemer venture partners and crv.
rundoo use of funds
the company plans to use the new capital to expand its engineering team in redwood city and its go-to-market organization in chicago, as well as to increase investment in technology for its customers.
about rundoo
founded in 2021 by college roommates nick hershey and andrew beckman, rundoo provides an ai-first system of record for independent supply stores. The companys platform integrates point-of-sale, e-commerce, crm, loyalty programs, and general ledger capabilities, using ai agents to help store operators manage inventory, pricing, and customer engagement.
funding details
company website: https://rundoo.Com
company: rundoo
raised: $30m
round: series b
funding date: august 19, 2026
lead investor: battery ventures
additional investors: bessemer venture partners, crv
company website: https://rundoo.Com
software category: retail technology
source: https://www.Citybiz.Co/article/891541/rundoo-raises-30-million-series-b-to-expand-ai-platform-for-independent-supply-stores/ |
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| Democratic attorney general candidates face off at Spotlight Delaware debate |
| Posted on Thursday, August 20 @ 00:01:53 PDT (0 reads) | |
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Spotlight delaware hosted a debate tuesday night in wilmington for the three democrats vying for the party’s nomination in the sept. 15 primary election.
incumbent attorney general kathy jennings faced challengers dwayne bensing, the former legal director of the american civil liberties union of delaware, and patty rickman, a domestic abuse survivor turned advocate and author.
each candidate answered a dozen questions from editor in chief jacob owens around criminal prosecution, civil rights litigation and public transparency of law enforcement over the course of more than an hour of conversation.
the entire unedited conversation can be found in a podcast while the transcript that follows is lightly edited for clarity and concision.
patty, you are not an attorney, but the state constitution does not require you to be one, to be attorney general. Delaware has never elected an attorney general who is not a member of the state bar, though. Why should voters buck that trend, and how would you approach the role if elected?
rickman: so thank you very much for that question, and i’ve been getting that question a lot lately. I’m a domestic violence survivor turned advocate, turned author, and now your next attorney general. And i have seen the criminal justice system from the inside out.
my abuser pled guilty twice to domestic violence related to crimes like stalking, domestic terrorism, and multiple violations of the court order. So i’ve seen where the laws that are supposed to defend and protect all delawareans, not be adjudicated in our criminal justice system.
i do have vast litigation experience with my health care background. For 25 years, i owned a small accounts receivable company where i stood up to big insurance payers like unitedhealthcare and blue cross/blue shield, where i stood toe-to-toe when they denied claims, and they could have been adjudicated and fallen to our seniors and our veterans.
and i stood toe-to-toe with them multiple times, and i had a 96% success rating, which is the same as litigation. And why i’m running is because we need someone to stand up and say, law and order should be applied and adjudicated, and that we should make sure that all laws are enforced to protect all delawareans. And i’m that attorney general that will do that. Thank you.
dwayne, the attorney general represents the interest of delaware in civil and criminal cases. You clearly have a long career in civil rights litigation, but you have never served as a prosecutor. How would you approach bridging that gap for doj’s criminal division oversight?
bensing: that’s right. I certainly approach this as a civil rights attorney.
my career has been as a civil rights attorney. And the reason that i’m running is because i think that the challenges we’re facing right now as a society, not just from donald trump in washington, d.C., But also the tech bro billionaire class, the so-called broligarchy, needs leadership in the office for attorney general in the department of justice who understands the north star of our civil rights protections.
and those civil rights are the cornerstone of our criminal prosecution as well. Our constitutional rights to privacy, our constitutional rights from cruel and excessive force, our constitutional rights to be treated equally under the law.
and i think that what many delawareans have experienced is that our department of justice is not evenly applied to our criminal matters and our civil matters. So we need a leader in that office who understands the challenges our democracy faces, that the call is coming from inside the house.
and so i’m ready to lead the department of justice, lead our criminal division and our civil division and our civil rights division to ensure that all of the constitutional and civil rights of our citizens are enforced, enforced with vigilance, because we’ve got to protect democracy right here in the first state.
kathy, you have served as attorney general for nearly eight years now. Delaware has rarely seen the role held for more than two terms in its modern history. Why do you want a third term and why should voters entrust you to it?
jennings: i grew up in this city to a single mom. My father left me before i was born and my mother was penniless. We moved in with my grandparents and i was raised in a very loving family, but we had very little in the way of material goods. So i grew up thinking, you know what, we need to help everyone achieve the american dream. My mom became a nurse. She was the first college graduate in our family. My grandma made it to eighth grade and that was it. But my mom was a real model for me. I have her wedding band on tonight because she will always be my hero. She became a public health nurse and i went with her everywhere.
so it’s no surprise that i joined the attorney general’s office to help delawareans. I joined the criminal division, second female in the criminal division. And i was lucky enough to have learned a great deal about the justice system, about trying cases.
i believe that where we are at this point in our history, in delaware, we have had the safest years on record in terms of violent crime. There’s still more work to be done, especially with respect to gun violence. And then we have a president in the white house who has turned the constitution and the rule of law on its head. I have sued him 60 times and he has two years left.
i will keep fighting for delawareans, for their rights, for the money they deserve, as long as that man is in the white house. And i hope that we can then elect a democratic president.
kathy, you told the joint finance committee last year that the department of justice was, “critically understaffed,” with 31 vacancies among 243 attorney positions, including many senior deputy attorney general positions. Has that situation materially improved? And what have you learned about why experienced attorneys were or are leaving?
jennings: retention is a national issue for public service attorneys. It always has been. And unfortunately, our deputy attorneys general can serve 10 years in the office and they still don’t make a starting salary in a private firm in this city. It’s outrageous.
and each and every year, i fight for more attorneys, more support staff. And each and every year, we fight to get them raises.
they unionized. Our office is a union shop right now. And that is a very good thing. With the union’s help, i advocated successfully with a brand new governor that we should get a substantial raise for the people in our office. What i can say is they got it. They got 20% over three years. But it is not nearly enough.
we need more and i’ll keep fighting for more. Our vacancy rate has gone down dramatically with that improvement. And i can tell you that i am so honored to work with amazing people in our office. They certainly don’t stay for the money.
dwayne and patty, how would you address the doj hiring practices to ensure the department isn’t shorthanded into the future?
bensing: i think acceptance is the first step to recovery here. And i’m glad to hear that our attorney general is now working on this issue. But it shouldn’t have ever reached crisis levels. And it was just last year that it was a vacancy crisis.
and let me tell you, that results in taxpayer dollars going to private elite law firms, the ones that were just referenced in this city, making a lot more than i make as legal director of the aclu of delaware. That we’re outsourcing that work to those private law firms because we don’t have enough talent in the delaware department of justice.
our attorney general has been there for eight years. Any public interest attorney, and i’ve spent my career as a public interest attorney, could see this crisis coming down the pike. It should not have taken the unionization of our delaware department of justice to be the wake-up call that we needed to increase the morale, to increase the pay.
i’ve spent my career as a public interest lawyer. I know what motivates folks. I like to joke that i’m the lowest paid lawyer in the state of delaware. I’m not quite sure that’s true, but it’s pretty close. And so i know that what calls people to public interest is not the paycheck. It is the work that we do. And so you really need a leader who understands how to retain talent.
i grew the aclu legal department from a department of one to a department that now has three staff attorneys, two first-year legal fellows, and a paralegal. I know how to recruit people. I know what the call to service feels like for a young generation. So i’m a professor at the delaware law school, and we will increase that pipeline of young talent with the work and the mission of the department of justice.
rickman: i’m a lead-by-example type leader. I feel like the buck stops with me, and i totally take accountability for all of my businesses that i’ve owned.
and from what my experience is in the criminal justice system from a domestic violence survivor turned advocate is that i did not experience many, and i have to say many, employees from the delaware department of justice that seemed happy. And there was a lot of retention turnover.
just in my experience, it was between six and eight. And the feedback that i would get off the record, they’d say, ‘off the record, ms. Rickman, is that the policies and procedures were not followed and abided by, and that it was seemingly a catch-and-release system.’ And what i know about leadership is, if you’re not happy with what you do, if you’re not abiding by the rules and the policies and procedures as an employee, if you don’t have the leader that stands by that integrity, then you’re not going to be happy with what you do. And it’s not going to speak to us delawareans.
i know that from my experience, and as an advocate, i’ve talked to now thousands of domestic violence survivors, sexual assault survivors, their neighbors, their friends, their family. And it’s been the same report. They’ve had the same experience with the criminal justice system. And if you’re a survivor and you’re having that as a victim, and the neighbors and the friends and the nieces and the nephews, there’s something going on.
and it starts with the leadership. And as an attorney general, that would default to me. And i intend on leading by example and having an inclusive leadership staff with me and following laws and following policies and procedures so that retention is higher, so that we don’t have the issue that has just been within the last year.
gun violence has been a historic issue in delaware. The state reached a recent peak in 2022 when 82 people were killed in 233 shootings. The numbers have fallen significantly since then, but 47 people still died last year in shootings as deaths had ticked up in recent years. What is one change you would make to delaware’s approach to prosecuting gun crimes? And what evidence convinces you that that change would make delaware safer?
bensing: so i applaud our general assembly for taking on this challenge. We’ve had some amazing progress in our enforcement opportunities at the delaware department of justice to really stem the gun violence where it starts.
we have got to track down these illegal guns that are getting out into our community, and we need to get it at its source. And so i think that this whack-a-mole approach to gun violence that we’ve had that really lends itself to unconstitutional policing, we have stops that occur and then we seize the weapon, we need a more strategic approach that really comes from or addresses the supply side of where these weapons are coming from.
delaware is the source of a lot of where these illegal guns are coming from in delaware crimes for gun crimes and also regionally. And so this has been an issue that we’ve been working on for years, and it’s taken years for us to finally get the general assembly to wake up to this crisis of gun violence.
i think delaware is a microcosm of what we’re seeing on the national level. We brag about crime rates being low, well, that tracks perfectly with our national crime rates. I don’t think that any person at this table can take any credit for that decrease in our crime levels or the priority that needs to be placed on reining in gun violence and the gun access in our communities. But i think it starts at the source, who are the gun distributors, who are the gun sellers, who are providing the community with these illegal guns.
rickman: so i want to start off by a name, kadir skinner. You know, and i find myself getting emotional just talking about him, but i feel like we have to have the ‘meet-our-delawareans-where they-are approach.’
we cannot say that pointing the fingers as adults, as politicians, as humans, is not going to filter into our youth. It is. And i will piggyback on a little bit of what dwayne said, because i agree with that. We need to get the illegal guns off the streets. And meeting our youth where they are, going into communities, talking to leaders, talking to the families, sitting down and having conversations.
you know, i have to be fair and just, because that’s who i am, but hearing a little bit of kathy jennings’ private story really got to me, because i’d never heard it before. And i appreciate her sharing that with us.
that’s how we connect as humans. That’s how we connect as individuals. And we need to go into our communities and have mentorship programs for our youth. That’s what they need. They don’t need to see the redirection as politicians. They need inclusion. They need unity. And that’s going to be my approach as your next attorney general.
jennings: public safety is the no. 1 issue that the attorney general is responsible for. And it’s the no. 1 issue above all else. Always has been. Always will be.
gun violence has been an almost intractable problem for so many years. There was a time when wilmington was known as “murder town.”
and it was incredibly frustrating to learn about. And so when i took office in 2019, we went to work. We are equipping our police departments with crime gun intelligence centers. Wilmington has one now, which is a huge benefit because we can trace a gun, a crime gun, back to its origin. And that makes a big difference. Every month, i sit down with the u.S. Attorney, with the mayor, with the police chief, with the federal partners like atf and others. And we track every gun arrest in our city. And we make sure that we are focused on the most violent gun offenders. That’s the no. 1 reason why someone goes to prison right now.
but, you know, patty’s right. The answer is not just locking people up. We need to do it. We need to make our streets safer. And we have made our streets safer. But the problem is that if we’re not working on prevention, we’re not giving children the tools that they need from the very beginning of their lives, then we’re going to rinse and repeat. And so we’re heavily involved in a gun violence intervention program that, in part, is run by an employee in our office, corie priest. And it’s making a difference. They’re taking the most violent offenders among us, and they’re teaching them a different way.
juvenile arrests remain substantially lower than a decade ago. But violent offense arrests have risen from their pandemic-era lows. How do you assess delaware’s current approach to juvenile diversion? And what would you change, if anything, to reduce serious youth offending while keeping young people out of the criminal justice system when appropriate?
rickman: i think i kind of touched on that with the last question. We need to meet our youth where they are. I’m originally from baltimore, maryland. And my parents owned a home right outside the city.
and i remember a time where our baltimore city police officers would play hopscotch and jump rope with our youth. And what that did is that built bridges, that planted seeds, and then mentors and priests and pastors would come into that. And then organizations like campus life, which is what i belonged to as a 14-year-old, it literally breathed life back into the human that i am. I would not be the candidate that i am sitting here if it wasn’t for a woman by the name of sarah woodlawn, who believed in me, who breathed that life back into me. Because i could have been caught up in different situations. And that’s what’s needed. We need to, you know, spend time with our youth.
if we’re not listening as leaders, and again, if we’re pointing fingers in the other direction, and constantly it’s the democrats versus the republicans versus the independents, and we can’t meet somewhere in the middle, then that is what our youth is ingesting. That is going to set them up for negativity. And depending on situations, they might go into a different direction. They might not have people like sarah to breathe life back into them.
we need to open our minds and realize that there are other things that we can do as leaders who would be able to achieve that. And then there’s conversations that me, as a 53-year-old white lesbian woman, will not understand that we’ll be having in black american and delawarean homes. They have conversations with their young sons that i will never understand. So we need to meet our delawareans where they are.
jennings: this is the most important issue of our time in our state and across our nation. Our children need us. They are our future. And we need to be their future as well.
that means that we need to have a public education system that is strong and that nurtures reading. I think the most important thing a young child can learn is how to read. It will guide the rest of their lives. And i can tell you that there are really great programs in delaware that focus on children, but there’s not enough. There’s not enough. And we need to do more.
we need to make sure that our children have the ability to grow up in a nurturing environment and to succeed. We have cut back in the criminal justice system, especially, and we have led on this effort, to make sure that children stay out of the school-to-prison pipeline. Civil citations are the norm now for a huge variety of crimes because that means a child never even needs to go to family court and get caught up in that system.
once a child ends up at ferris school, the recidivism rate is 85%. That’s outrageous. That needs to change. We should never get there. And if we can continue to nurture youth throughout their childhood, i believe we can do a whole lot better in our state and that we’ll be safer and our children will be better off.
bensing: well, our youth is exactly what brought me to delaware. I was on the legal team that sued our state because of their failure to provide an adequate education to our students.
we’ve had leaders in delaware who talk platitudes about our youth and our future, but when push comes to shove, have not made the investments that are necessary. The result of our litigation against the state, then-gov. Carney argued there was no constitutional right to an education. The result, the independent studies showed that we are underfunding our school systems by $600 million to $1 billion each year. That is a crisis level. And to put it in comparison, gov. Meyer called a special session when donald trump threatened to withhold $600 million of delaware state funds. I don’t know why an emergency session wasn’t called when the independent report on our education funding came out.
our education system is at crisis level, and we cannot address our juvenile justice system without addressing our education system. And it was our county executive, our counties’ executives, who ignored our property tax crisis. When attorney general jennings was no. 2 in the new castle county executive’s office, they turned a blind eye to the plain letter law that we need to reevaluate our property values. That has a direct impact on the resources available for our public schools to serve those students.
and the 85% recidivism rate that you just heard, that is such a failure that we are there after this many years of the current administration that we still cannot provide alternative pathways for our youth. I’m a former middle school teacher, so this issue matters tremendously to me. And we have got to find diversion programs that actually work and that do not result in the revolving door for our school-to-prison pipeline. We need to invest in programs and schools, not school resource officers that fast-track that school-to-prison pipeline. And we need to find actual community-based interventions that work and provide the necessary resources for our youth.
jennings: i served as second-in-command at the county for one year. During that period of time, my role in reassessment was zero.
in the past two years, delaware state police have announced at least 16 arrests involving people accused of their fifth, sixth, seventh, or even ninth dui offense. Several were allegedly driving on suspended or revoked licenses. What is failing when a driver reaches that level of repeat offending? And what should delaware do differently to prevent chronic dui offenders from getting back behind the wheel?
jennings: delaware has a good record with respect to dui enforcement. The first time someone is arrested for a dui, the numbers are very low in delaware. We’re among the best.
having said that, how in the world does someone get their third, fourth, fifth dui arrest? They get them because they’re driving. They’re not allowed to even start their car. They don’t have a license. What they do have is likely an addiction; a substance use disorder. That is exactly what these fifth, sixth, and seventh offenders have. They go to prison for a pretty long time, but when they get out, they’re still suffering from addiction, and they get behind the wheel. And when they get behind that wheel, that car becomes a deadly weapon.
i read every fatal incident report from the state police. They’re tragic. They’re horrible. Children get killed. Families get killed. And we need to make sure that the people who are killing motorists on our roadway are kept behind bars. We also need to use some of the $250 million i brought into this state for addiction treatment, because they’re not getting better without a whole lot of redirection. In the meantime, we have to keep our state safe.
bensing: well, one of the first issues we have here is that we have a two-tiered approach to how we enforce our dui laws. There’s one set of rules for college presidents and state senators and children of judges, and there’s a whole other set of laws applicable to everyone else. And what we need, if we really are concerned about these dui repeat offenders, we need to ensure that there are consequences for these actions.
but you just heard the statistics from our attorney general. We cannot incarcerate our way out of addiction. And so when we’re trying to solve an addiction problem, we need addiction-based solutions. We had the $250 million settlement funds, and we had the opioid commission that our attorney general was the co-chair of.
a lot of communities are asking, where do those funds go? It is a shame that we still have this kind of crisis level for addiction-related criminal behavior, because i’ll tell you, it costs a lot more to send someone to jail than it does to send them to yale. We need to figure out a way that we get folks out of this recidivism, this cycle of addiction. And the program, our department of corrections, isn’t correcting any of this addiction problem. It’s just opening their revolving door for people to come right back in. So you have to set the standard high, enforce it evenly, and then ensure that you have programs that help lift people out of this crisis.
rickman: i don’t know about you guys, but i’m exhausted with opening up facebook or social media, seeing the pictures and images of duis of five and six. My youngest daughter, destiny, just turned 19, and what happens – as it relates to dui arrests affects and impacts all delawareans – as a mom, it’s destabilizing and scary and traumatizing to know that delaware has such a high rate.
in 2025, it’s 2,977 arrests. And from the experience from the delaware state police’s perspective, it’s not that the arrests aren’t being made. It’s that we are known as the catch-and-release criminal justice system.
both of my brothers suffered from the disease of addiction. And my brother, jack, was arrested with a dui, his first and his only. And in maryland, he lost his license for two years. And maryland made it so difficult that, thank god, he never was able to get it back.
what is happening in delaware? This is a safety issue. This is a human issue. We all shouldn’t be scared and nervous as delawareans worried that we’re going to be hurt when we’re driving to, you know, a grocery store. Because we can’t do what we need to do as leaders. We cannot hold people accountable. There’s a delineation between the disease of addiction and holding someone accountable for multiple duis. Both can be true. It’s my “and” approach.
one of the most prevalent issues around delaware this past year has been how to address increasing homelessness. Local governments have increasingly sought doj guidance on how they can address homelessness while respecting constitutional protections and responding to quality of life concerns. What should the attorney general’s role be in defining those legal boundaries? And where should the doj stay out?
bensing: so this is really my attorney general race origin story, because as legal director of the aclu, i had to sue our attorney general to stop enforcing unconstitutional laws that criminalize poverty, that criminalize our unhoused.
for me, this is very deeply personal. Like our attorney general, actually, i was raised by my grandmother as a result of a car accident that my mother had on her way making the nightly deposit for her boss. And while the millionaire boss went on vacation, my family lost our mobile home and we ended up sleeping in sleeping bags in my grandma’s living room. And it wasn’t until i was an adult and a lawyer that i realized some agency laws probably applied there to that millionaire boss. But also that i was definitionally unhoused. And so this is a personal issue.
just like we can’t criminalize our way out of addiction, we cannot criminalize our way out of poverty. I had the opportunity to tour some of the facilities at friendship house just a couple of weeks ago. And the programs and resources that they’re providing to the under-resourced communities here in wilmington and throughout new castle county are phenomenal. We cannot address our homeless issue with the department of justice.
it must be addressed as a community of neighbors. And i’ll tell you what, if i had been attorney general when mayor carney decided to do that sweep right here in wilmington, i would have sued him under delaware’s constitution protection against cruel punishment. Because while the supreme court might say that’s ok under grants pass, delaware’s constitution prohibits cruel punishment. And the homeless sweep that happened here in wilmington was cruel. Full stop.
rickman: i echo a lot of what dwayne said, and this is near and dear to my heart. I’m from baltimore. As i stated, my father did not have a legal degree, but he was an engineer for bethlehem steel, where he worked for the majority of his career. And when they did layoffs, my father was laid off, and we were just a few paychecks away from being homeless. And my mother took up child care to help save and sustain our family.
so i am acutely aware of what this could do to a family. I believe that most of us delawareans are one or two paychecks away from this catastrophic event of being homeless. And i also want to share something else. There is a pastor by the name of jill, and she, i don’t remember the name of the church, and i apologize on her behalf, but she is right now filing a lawsuit against the city of ocean city, maryland, where she has housed, i believe it’s 50 homeless citizens in ocean city. And i just applaud her.
that’s what we need to do as humans. We need to take care of one another. That’s what we’re here to do. This is a human issue. And as your next attorney general, i will make it one of my platforms to make sure that we remain human, and i will be a lead by example type person. And never forget where i came from.
jennings: well, i’ll tell you what it’s not. The presence or absence of a loitering law isn’t solving homelessness. I can tell you that.
we have a national issue. This is a public health and housing crisis. And when i talk to friendship house, the no. 1 reason someone is homeless is because they couldn’t pay their rent, or their mortgage got foreclosed on, and they’re out on the street. There is no way on god’s green earth that those people who were living in the homeless tents, in the tents in christina park, should have been prosecuted. I was told, prosecute these people if they’re there after dark. That’s ridiculous. That’s not solving a problem. That’s creating another problem. So maybe we actually agree on something.
but i can tell you this, that our office has sued the federal government because trump decided he was going to cut funding to make sure that people were housed. That would have caused hundreds of delawareans to lose their homes under the continuum of care. And we won, just like we won 90% of our lawsuits. That’s hundreds of people who are housed. Our office mediates something probably not any of you know. Our office mediates mortgage foreclosure cases to keep people in their homes. We have saved thousands of people from becoming homeless. Those are direct things that an attorney general can do. But it is a crisis. We need to be kind. We need to be decent. And we need to be helpful.
attorney general jennings, you’ve sued the trump administration more than 60 times. Some critics say that’s evidence that you’re concerned more about politics than the results, especially when it comes to multi-district litigation that may impact delaware regardless of whether the doj is involved. So how do you decide which cases to join, which cases not to join, and where do you feel the appropriate role for the doj is when suing the federal government?
jennings: the appropriate role for doj in delaware is how the federal government’s actions are affecting delawareans. And when it affects delawareans in their pocketbook, we’re going to sue.
i was the chair of the democratic attorney general association for four years. So a lot of those years were under trump. What i can tell you is he keeps threatening to cut off our funding over and over and over again for unlawful reasons. And we keep suing him. And, yes, we’ve sued him 60 times. And we’ve saved the state $1 billion in federal funding that is still coming into delaware because of those lawsuits.
i am so proud of the work that our attorneys in the office have done. They’re proud of their work. It’s amazing. Joining a lawsuit is a lot of work. We have led on lawsuits over funding. And we have joined lawsuits. But that means we have to be able to show that delawareans would be harmed. And i think $1 billion is a heck of a lot of your taxpayer money that’s still coming in as a result of those lawsuits.
i will never stop fighting for delawareans. One of the most important lawsuits we filed was the suit against trump’s tariffs. He imposed these tariffs. You know what tariffs are? They’re a tax on consumers. That’s all they are. It’s your groceries. It’s gas. It’s food. It’s cars. It’s everything you pay for. We went all the way to the united states supreme court, and we won. So we tried it again with trump 2.0’s tariffs, and we won. And we will continue to fight this battle for you.
bensing: i agree with the framework there, but i really want to pull back the curtains. I think our attorney general acts like she’s the elena delle donne of the attorneys general. Not one of those cases have been filed in the state of delaware. Not one. These are all group projects.
i watched the attorney general’s campaign ad this weekend and it’s her entire narrative for reelection. I mastered signing my name in elementary school. I will join those cases. The delaware attorney general will sign on to these multi-state litigation.
what we need is to get real about what we’re taking credit for and the actual impact and work that we’re doing within the state of delaware. Our attorney general wasn’t there when other attorneys general were suing elon musk when he was destroying our federal government under doge. Our attorney general wasn’t there when sam altman wanted to convert openai from a nonprofit to a for-profit. Our attorney general wasn’t there to investigate all the epstein anonymous llcs that are operating and using the delaware franchise. She wasn’t there when donald trump was cashing out on the inaugural committee with his llcs that use the delaware franchise.
so really, we need to clean up our own backyard. If we’re going to talk the talk about fighting trump, we need an attorney general who knows how to walk the walk and fight the fight. I’m at the aclu. So as many cases as the democratic attorneys general have brought, and i applaud them for their work, there are about twice as many that have been brought by the national aclu. So if we’re taking credit for group projects, i’d like to sign my name on those briefs.
jennings: that’s just flat out false, dwayne, and you know it. It is flat out false. We have been the leader. The reason none of these lawsuits have been filed in the state of delaware is because we have the third circuit of appeals, and not one democratic attorney general in the country wants to be in front of the third circuit, which just said assault weapons bans are unconstitutional, for god’s sakes.
so that’s a tactical decision that is made by all of the democratic attorneys general. I am proud of these lawsuits. These lawsuits matter. The lawsuit that we filed on day two of trump’s administration to preserve birthright citizenship under the constitution of the united states, under the 14th amendment, yeah, that matters.
rickman: so, first and foremost, i am not a fan of donald trump. I have not really said that publicly, but there you have it.
but 60 lawsuits? When our delawareans are suffering, when we’re talking about homelessness, when we’re talking about our youth incarceration, when we’re talking about violence, when we’re talking about whether the public can pay for their gas or electric? Because i know it’s like tripled in the last year. How about we worry about delaware?
i’m not saying that we can’t file lawsuits, but can we share the responsibility? Can we worry about delaware primarily and then get into donald trump? How about, with all due respect, kathy, how about you answer when your constituents email you? I’ve been waiting for four years and three months for a response from you. Worry about what’s going on in delaware primarily, not what’s going on in washington, d.C.
i believe that some of her lawsuits are legitimate. I will hand her that. I will say that i agree with some of them. But for the love of god, could we worry about delaware? Like, we need to focus on delawareans. We need to make sure that we have safety and our kids are being looked after. And we’re not pointing the fingers because that’s the political partisan issue to do. How about we meet in the middle? How about we stop pointing the finger at one man and start looking at our own backyard like what dwayne said? I agree with him. That would be my approach. I am a lead by example type person. What you see is what you get. There will be no surprises with my administration. I am not saying that i wouldn’t file a lawsuit against donald trump, but i will definitely say that my delawareans will be taken care of primarily.
the trump administration has taken a hardline approach to immigration enforcement, which has often come into conflict with delaware leaders’ efforts to support undocumented residents. When federal immigration enforcement conflicts with delaware policies or requests for state-held information, what legal standards should the attorney general use to decide when delaware cooperates, when it refuses, and when it challenges the federal government in court?
rickman: now, this is something that’s near and dear to my heart. My youngest daughter that my ex-wife and i adopted from guatemala is brown-skinned and we had to have a talk with her about a year and a half ago. I would say that she has to go everywhere with her passport because we were worried that she was going to be pulled over and searched.
so, as your next attorney general, i’m going to make sure that’s an “and” approach. That we make sure that we have legal documentation, but there will be no time that anybody in my state, and no delawareans, are going to fear that they’re going to be dragged out of their houses in front of their children. That will not happen under my leadership.
both things can exist. And i believe that no one in the state of delaware and beyond should ever fear these things happening, should ever worry about those things. That would never happen under my watch. Just watching as certain things were televised, and our youth is watching these things as they’re unfolding. Can you imagine what they feel? Especially our latino and hispanic communities in other states where it’s propagated.
i’m not good with names. I’m dyslexic. But there was a young woman that was killed right on camera. Those things would not happen under my administration.
jennings: ice, as we know it right now, is a bunch of stormtroopers that have descended upon cities across our country. Now they have shock gloves. I mean, it’s outrageous. And we can’t cooperate with an organization that is that evil, that separates parents and children, that ships off a domestic violence victim to a detention center in louisiana in the middle of the night. We fought successfully to get her back. But, you know, that should never happen in this country.
what’s happening is outrageous. That’s why i fought to make sure that the police in our state were being policed in our state for delawareans and not cooperating with ice. That should not happen. And now we have a law that says it will not happen.
i also fought against the u.S. Attorney’s office and the federal government’s subpoena for department of labor records that were based on the origin of those business owners and that were clearly designed to get at latino and other business owners. We fought for almost a year to make sure those records weren’t produced. We didn’t win in court, but you know what? That was a fight worth fighting.
and we will continue to fight against ice. If they do anything to break the law in delaware, i will be there.
bensing: well, let’s start where our attorney general just ended. The first step is called a motion to quash. And that’s what the department of justice failed to do. And our chief judge reprimanded our department of justice and said, “this was not your best day.” We can’t afford not to have our best day in federal court against the trump administration, particularly when one of the most vulnerable communities is under attack.
that’s the record of the attorney general. That’s the one case: donald trump v. Kathy jennings. We lost. We should not have lost that case. This 287g agreement issue is really important because it’s about public trust. It’s about whether our vulnerable communities can relay information to their local police departments. And the aclu, as soon as donald trump was elected, advocated.
the reason that we have that bill is because the aclu actually discovered that our local police departments were working with federal ice agents. And we said, ‘whoa, you’ve got to stop this. This is undermining the public trust in our local police departments.’ Fortunately, our general assembly responded quickly. But we were raising these flags early on.
we cannot be caught flat-footed with any of the attacks on our immigrant community. There is a national group called the federation against federal overreach. Larry krasner, the district attorney in philadelphia, is a part of that group, fafo. You get it? And we need to join that. We need to join that federation because if any federal agent violates state law, we need to ensure that our attorney general is there to enforce state law that protects our communities.
also, i just want to underscore, because we talk a lot about trump, but what we’re not talking about are the other threats against our society. And that’s this broligarchy class. And we have employers here in delaware that are taking advantage of our immigrant community, that are taking advantage of those that are vulnerable in our workplaces and consumers. We need to prosecute those that are violating and the fraudsters that are violating the rights of our immigrant communities right here in delaware.
delaware has long debated transparency reforms around law enforcement and the law enforcement officer bill of rights, including in 2023, when reforms didn’t quite go as far as some advocates had hoped. One of the biggest omissions from that debate was opening police disciplinary files to the public under the freedom of information act. Should those records be open to the public? And if so, what information, if any, should remain confidential?
bensing: absolutely those records should be open to the public. Our police officers are public servants. The news journal just published last week our top 10 paid folks. Seven of the top 10 are law enforcement officers. That’s your taxpayer dollars. We must, as taxpayers, be able to hold our police officers accountable.
our attorney general is fighting to keep their names concealed. I had to go to the delaware supreme court to have the delaware state police issue the names of our delaware state police officers. Now, that should offend everyone in here. We should not have a secret police force, especially when we have the kind of authoritarianism happening at the national level.
our attorney general has broad jurisdiction to enforce our freedom of information act. And time and again, whether it’s to sue to find out how much of our taxpayer dollars are paying elite law firms here in wilmington to represent the state, whether it’s rep. Bryan shupe’s foia request to find out how much our delaware department of justice is actually spending to fight trump, those records time and again get denied. Those requests get denied time and again by our attorney general.
the leobor is about the personnel records, but our department of justice investigates our criminal activities. And so we have to be as transparent as possible. It’s not enough that we’re the first state to have body-worn cameras. Why was that law passed without any policies in place to describe to delawareans when and how that information will be released so that we can hold bad actors accountable, including when that is our police officers? I have a deep commitment to transparency. I don’t believe we should just trust our government. I think that they should show their work. And so as leader of the department of justice, i will ensure that our state agencies show their work.
rickman: absolutely. Government trust, public safety, and government transparency should be paramount. And it will be paramount under my leadership.
i believe it was 2023 when gov. Carney passed the transparency law. And that was about the body cam footage. I myself, as a domestic violence survivor turned advocate, filed a foia request when i was the victim. And i was denied. And every single victim that i talked to that has gone through the same process has been denied. Those are questions that need answers.
it shouldn’t be about who you know. It shouldn’t be about if your uncle is a superior court judge in the state of delaware or who you’re affiliated with or what political figure you know to get you out of trouble. It’s about government transparency. There should be policies and procedures. There should be transparency.
i’m the leader that’s going to make sure of that, because the buck stops with me. If there is a law that’s enacted that states that body cam footage should be available, then if a victim of a crime requests that body cam footage, they should be able to access it. I’m not sure why that is. Those are questions that need to be answered. And we as delawareans, we the people, we the people decide. Not the politicians, not who you know, we the people.
jennings: i was part of the reforms that took place with the legislature. I was the head of the use of force task force and we made substantial changes to leobor. Founded instances of serious misconduct are open to the public. And that’s by law. That’s because i worked for it.
i am the reason there is a body-worn camera on every officer in the state, because i fought for that. And as the general assembly convenes again, i’m going to fight to have a law passed that requires every police department to publicly make available body-worn camera footage. We have 47 police departments in this state, and there are probably that many policies. T
hat is wrong, and it should be uniform. The police should be required to release body-worn camera footage to the public. We’re going to work on that in the next general assembly.
the recent police-related killing of kadir skinner has raised questions of whether the public deserves more access to officer-worn body camera footage. Attorney general jennings pushed to release the footage even ahead of a determination of whether the incident should lead to charges. When police use deadly force, should officer body camera footage generally be released before the doj completes its criminal investigation? And what circumstances would justify withholding it?
jennings: i think it’s important to look at what the laws are out there. Colorado has an outstanding law on public release of body-worn camera footage. There is a delay of anywhere between two weeks and i think 30 days, i could be wrong on that, before it should be released because it can influence how a witness ends up perceiving the events.
not intentionally, but it can influence a witness who has to really talk about what that witness knows, not what they saw on the body-worn camera footage. So that’s important. And that takes probably a couple of weeks.
but yes, i believe that body-worn camera footage should be shown to the public.That’s the reason we got the law.
bensing: yes, it should be. It should be revealed. These are public records. You are paying for these body-worn cameras.
and i’m surprised to hear the attorney general say what she just said, because her office has issued opinions saying that body-worn cameras are not public records that ought to be accessible to the public. So i’m glad to hear it, and they should be. And i don’t believe that the body-worn camera footage law should have ever been implemented without the policies in place for how we were going to make sure that that footage is accessible to the public.
it makes you wonder, what’s the purpose? And the purpose has been to defend law enforcement officers’ actions. It has been to delay investigations of the investigations of excessive force that result in fatalities. Not one of those police officers have been held criminally accountable. And oftentimes, those investigations take not months, but years before the public has access to that full investigative file.
these are important matters that undermine public trust. If our communities don’t believe that the police officers who are sworn to protect and serve them are actually going to protect and serve them, if they don’t believe that the department of justice will be independent, when you have an attorney general who campaigned as the “top cop,” it’s very difficult for our community to then turn to that attorney general to investigate police abuse, to investigate police excessive force, and to investigate police fatalities.
i’m not beholden to any police department or the status quo in any way whatsoever. I was actually in court against the wilmington police department the same day that kadir skinner was shot and killed. So we need an independent attorney general who will hold our officers accountable when they step out of the line of their duty. Thank you.
jennings: i have prosecuted police officers when they violate their oath to serve the public and break the law 15 times. That’s more than any other attorney general in the history of our state. And i don’t hesitate to prosecute when someone breaks the law.
but speaking of dropping bombs, mr. Bensing, you’ve never prosecuted a single case, not one, not one in the history of your profession. And so i have to say, it’s really hard to hear you talk about, we do this wrong, we do that wrong, you’re going to drop bombs.
i’ve been there. I’ve done that. I’ve prosecuted domestic violence cases. I have prosecuted rape cases. I have prosecuted murder cases. And i have prosecuted delaware’s only serial killer. You have not once.
bensing: well, it is the department of justice, not the department of prosecution. I know that our constitutional rights are what underpin our entire fabric of our society. I’ve brought plenty more civil rights cases than our attorney general ever has.
the question is, do we have the leadership and the independent oversight to lead this office forward? And she’ll talk about those 15 prosecutions of police officers, but the truth of the matter is over 20 civilians are dead because of a police officer shooting. And not one of those cases has resulted in criminal charges being brought by our delaware department of justice. That undermines trust, particularly when it takes years for those investigations to complete. It looks like a cover-up.
rickman: well, i wouldn’t be the leader that i will be if i didn’t say it should be a case-by-case basis. There should be a full investigation. But i also agree that public trust, we have to meet people where we are and there are large communities that are feeling like they are invisible to the criminal justice system.
and why wouldn’t they? If there hasn’t been any formal accountability, like to speak to what dwayne just said, then why wouldn’t communities feel invisible? Why wouldn’t they feel like we need answers? We need to be protected.
kadir skinner, he’s no longer with us. His parents will never see his smile again. And we need accountability for that if that turns out to be, from an investigation standpoint, what it directs to. That’s what the attorney general is supposed to do. It shouldn’t be about how much money you have or what lawyer you can afford or what community you’re from or who you know. It should be about law and order, justice, criminal justice. That’s what attorney generals are supposed to do.
the doj has been criticized in recent months for not disclosing certain charges, including against public officials charged with misdemeanors or in the case of at least one sex abuse case when concerns for the victim were raised. What should trigger a public announcement by the department of justice when someone is criminally charged? And should the standard differ for misdemeanors, public officials, or cases involving particularly sensitive victims?
rickman: so this is a difficult question for me to answer, and it’s only because there have been so many political figures that have gotten away with things that they should have never gotten away with.
i don’t typically name people out loud, but mr. John atkins. He’s getting ready to go through, he’s campaigning for a race but he’s a domestic violence offender. He’s been convicted. I believe he had gotten a dui.
what is happening in delaware? How is this so common? Why do we have politicians protecting domestic violence abusers? Why is that a thing? And it’s not a one-time thing. If you pay attention, if you do your research, you’ll find that this is very prevalent in our state. It’s disturbing. It should not happen.
across the board, domestic violence is a non-partisan issue. It doesn’t matter if you’re a democrat, republican, or independent. If you commit a violent act, you should be held accountable. I don’t care if you’re a politician. Again, i don’t care if your uncle is a superior court judge.
under my leadership, that will not exist. Full stop. And i’m not sure i understand why it’s happening at such an alarming rate. I’m used to politicians like barbara mikulski. She was who she said she was. She stood for all marylanders. I’m not sure what’s happening here in the state of delaware. So as your next attorney general, i will prosecute and make sure that i hold accountable politicians, police officers, whomever you are.
jennings: i think there are rare occasions.
there are occasions, when a victim is so traumatized and has already been through the process once. For example, in another state where the offender receives seven years in prison, but cannot go through it again a second time in the state of delaware where if the case is publicized, everyone around this victim will know who she is. I’m going to side with the victim each and every time. And that’s my own belief.
i side with the prosecutors who tried to prosecute that case. You can’t prosecute a case if you don’t have the evidence. And if a victim is completely unwilling and too hurt to come forward, that’s our system. And we have to understand that victims come first.
so for me, it matters a great deal. There’s also a law that just got passed, by the way, that i’m not sure, jake, you might be a fan of, which is that there will be no announcements of felony indictments unless there is a clear public safety reason. So even though a victim may be named, you can’t name the defendant and you can’t publicly announce that indictment. That will set transparency back a long way.
bensing: whatever the policy is, it needs to be evenly applied. And we need to know what the rules of the road are in our department of justice. What records will be transparently provided to the public on what timeframe?
and it should not depend who that defendant is. It should not be that those who are politically connected have one set of rule books and then everybody else has another. And i think far too often what has been uncovered is that there are inconsistencies.
living in wilmington, i get nixle reports on a regular basis. And it has the mugshot and the name and age of the person who’s been arrested for a crime. And we still, to this day, six weeks later, don’t know the name of the person who shot kadir skinner. So there’s a different rulebook depending on who the defendant is, who the person who has engaged in criminal activity.
we just have to have the same rules for everyone. I think that there are sensitive matters and i think that there are ways to redact the names of victims and still keep our dedication to transparency of those who have violated our laws and violated our public trust.
we’re going to go to closing statements. I’m going to start with attorney general kathy jennings and work our way down the table. And patty, if you want to take an extra 60 seconds for not getting rebuttals tonight, please feel free to do so.
jennings: i want to thank jacob owens and spotlight delaware for arranging this debate. Debates really are the foundation of our democracy and i am so proud of all of you for showing up tonight because you took time out of your busy schedules to participate in democracy. So thank you.
i’ve said countless times before that i’m not really interested in criticizing other democrats. I am interested in helping delawareans. We have seen the six safest years this state has seen since records began in terms of violent crime in our state. That takes a lot of work and it really matters.
i’m running again because i want to continue that work. I know what works, i know what doesn’t, and we’re making substantial progress in our state and i want to keep doing that. I also know that we have a president who is completely out of control. He is destroying our democracy, he ignores the constitution and as long as i am your attorney general, i’m going to keep fighting him because it’s a fight we must win as we go forward.
bensing: well, i will also fight donald trump as your attorney general. Unfortunately, we have two more years, but there will be life after donald trump and what we need is a leader who’s ready to bring delaware forward to address the challenges that our democracy faces right now, not just from donald trump, but for the two years of the next attorney general’s administration of fighting to ensure that we are committed to our democracy right here.
i think the challenges we’re facing not just from donald trump but the broligarchy, the elon musk, the sam altman’s of the world, these challenges are unprecedented and the decisions our attorney general has made show us that the old playbook does not work to address today’s problems.
we need to pass the torch to a new generation of leadership that understands the threats that our democracy faces. I’ve had an entire career as a civil rights lawyer. This is exactly the fight of my professional career. And so i’m ready to lead the department of justice. I’m ready to lead the broad jurisdiction that this office has, not just criminal safety issues but also our civil enforcement issues and our civil rights protections; to be an independent attorney general that holds our government agencies accountable so that those who take the oath of office are serving you and making sure that civil rights is the fundamental north star of the delaware department of justice.
rickman: thank you so much for all the delawareans that are here tonight, for spotlight delaware and for everybody that’s listening online. I really appreciate you, i will stand, protect and fight for all delawareans.
what’s interesting to me is that we have such a push and redirection. We’re like pointing at the wizard of oz behind the screen. We’re saying that that person is the evil dictator and yes, he very well may be, but there’s so many other evil people out in the world. To kathy’s point, she mentioned i don’t want to spend time addressing anything with democrats. We need to. As an attorney general we need to make sure that even our democrats are upholding laws or upholding the constitution or abiding by their own ethics, which some of them are not.
we need to be holding them accountable just as much as we are holding donald trump accountable. And i know that’s the first time i mentioned his name tonight but there you have it. That’s what i will be as attorney general.
i am a lead-by-example-type person. I’m a domestic violence survivor turned advocate author and now your next attorney general. I want to meet with my delawareans. I want to hear from you. I want to hear what you would like to see as your next attorney general. It’s “we, the people.” Our constitution was created by that premise. We the people decide democracy. And i think i don’t want to speak for anybody but i think that i’ve heard it from so many victims, so many neighbors, so many brothers and sisters: we’re exhausted.
do you guys feel safe? I know i don’t. I don’t feel safe. I’m a stalking victim and i don’t feel safe. I don’t feel safe with the number of duis in the state of delaware. I don’t feel safe when we’re allowing some part of people that know politicians to get away with things that other people most of us are not able to get away with. I do not feel safe when there’s two sets of rules. Why is that? We need to speak to that. And as your next attorney general, i will. |
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| The Specter Of Economic Death Looms Over All Of Us In Late-Stage Surveillance Ca |
| Posted on Thursday, August 20 @ 00:01:53 PDT (0 reads) | |
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Authored by milan adams via preppgroup,
i used to think the whole “debanking” panic was overblown. I really did. I’d roll my eyes at the twitter threads and the think-pieces about how we’re all living in some dystopian soft-censorship nightmare. I’m a reasonable person, you know? I vote, i pay my taxes, i have a 401k that i check maybe twice a year when i’m feeling particularly masochistic. I thought the people screaming about being deplatformed or debanked were probably extremists, probably saying genuinely horrible stuff that any reasonable company would want to distance themselves from.
i was wrong about all of it, and i learned that lesson the hard way on a tuesday morning that started like any other.
let me tell you about march 14th, 2026. I remember the date because it was the day after my daughter’s seventh birthday, and we were still cleaning up wrapping paper and trying to find homes for the avalanche of plastic toys that had taken over our living room. I woke up, made coffee in the same black mug i always use, sat down at my desk to start the workday like i do every morning. I’m a freelance copywriter. Boring stuff. Product descriptions, email campaigns, the occasional blog post about software i don’t understand for companies i’ve never heard of. It pays the bills, or at least it used to before everything went sideways.
i tried to log into my chase account to check if a client had paid an overdue invoice and got an error message. Weird, but not unheard of. I tried the app. Nothing. I called the number, waited through forty minutes of hold music that sounded like it was composed by an ai having an existential crisis, and finally got through to a human being who told me my accounts had been “restricted” and that i’d need to come into a branch with two forms of id.
restricted. That’s the word they used. Not frozen, not closed. Restricted. Like i was a teenager who’d hit their data limit.
so i drove to the branch during my lunch break, still thinking this was some kind of mistake, probably related to that time my card got skimmed at a gas station in 2019. I brought my passport, my driver”s license, a utility bill, my social security card, basically every piece of identification i’ve accumulated in my thirty-four years of existence. I sat down with a nice woman named patricia who had the kind of patient smile that people develop after years of telling customers things they don’t want to hear. She typed for a while, her face slowly changing from professional neutrality to something more complicated, something that looked almost like embarrassment. Then she told me she couldn’t discuss the matter further and that i’d receive a letter explaining everything within ten business days.
ten business days. I had maybe three hundred dollars in cash in my apartment, a mortgage payment due in five days, and a family that likes to eat food on a regular basis. I asked her what i was supposed to do until then, how i was supposed to pay for groceries or gas or the medication my wife takes for her migraines, and she just gave me that smile again and said she was sorry but there was nothing she could do.
the letter came six days later, after i’d already borrowed money from my brother-in-law and explained to my daughter why we couldn’t go to the trampoline park we’d promised her for spring break. It was three paragraphs of corporate legalese that boiled down to one sentence: my accounts had been flagged for “suspicious activity related to potential money laundering and the financing of extremist organizations.”
i read it three times sitting on my porch, feeling like i’d slipped into some alternate reality where i was a completely different person than the one i thought i was. I’m not an extremist. I’ve never been arrested. The most radical thing i’d done in the past year was argue with my hoa about whether i could plant tomatoes in my front yard. But then i got to the second page, and there it was: the specific transactions that had triggered their algorithms. A $500 transfer to a legal defense fund. A $200 donation to a nonprofit that i’d later learn had been added to some obscure watchlist. A subscription to a newsletter that apparently shared contributors with other newsletters that shared contributors with organizations that someone, somewhere, had decided were problematic.
here’s the thing nobody tells you about the modern financial system: it’s not really run by humans anymore, not in any meaningful sense. It’s run by algorithms and risk-assessment matrices and third-party vendors that sell “reputational intelligence” to banks who are terrified of bad press and regulatory scrutiny. Somewhere in a server farm in virginia or maybe bangalore, a piece of software had scraped my social media, cross-referenced my donations with databases i’d never heard of, and decided i was a risk factor. And because banks are incentivized to be paranoid, because the cost of a false positive is nothing compared to the cost of missing a real bad actor, there was no appeal process that mattered. I called the number on the letter and spoke to people who genuinely seemed to want to help but had no power to do anything. I escalated to supervisors who read from scripts that all ended with the same phrase: “the decision has been made in accordance with our risk management protocols.”
i spent the next three weeks living in a kind of financial limbo that i wouldn’t wish on anyone. I couldn’t access my savings, which represented years of careful budgeting and sacrifice. My automatic payments started bouncing, which meant late fees and angry emails from creditors who didn’t care about my explanations. I had to ask my parents for a loan at thirty-four years old, which was humiliating in ways i can’t fully describe. My wife tried to be supportive, but i could see the worry in her eyes, the question she was too kind to ask: what if this doesn’t get fixed? What if this is just how things are now?
the efficiency of the surveillance machine: hard data from 2026 below are the official figures from fincen’s 2026 reporting cycle.
these numbers tell their own story about the scale of financial monitoring and its actual effectiveness:
a 0.001% success rate is not a law enforcement system. It is a mechanism of collective punishment designed to produce compliance through fear.
the part that really broke me wasn’t the practical stuff. It was the realization that someone, somewhere, had looked at my life and decided i was dangerous based on a handful of data points and association chains that i had no control over. I’ve always been politically engaged, sure. I post about local elections and environmental policy and sometimes i get into arguments in comment sections that i regret the next morning. But i’m not a radical. I’m a guy who likes to grill on weekends and worries about his kids’ education and thinks healthcare should be affordable. The donations that flagged me were to organizations that are completely legal, that have 501(c)(3) status, that operate in broad daylight. But someone had decided they didn’t like those organizations, or the people who run them, or the people who donate to them, and that dislike had cascaded through the system until it landed on me, sitting on my porch with a letter that made me feel like a criminal.
eventually, after i hired a lawyer i couldn’t afford and threatened to go to the press, the bank reversed their decision. I got a call from someone in their “executive relations” department who explained that there had been a “misunderstanding” and that my accounts were being restored with a “goodwill credit” for the inconvenience. Just like that, after weeks of stress and shame and financial precarity, it was over. I was supposed to be grateful, i think. I was supposed to accept their apology and move on and be happy that i could pay my mortgage again. But i can’t shake the feeling that i got a glimpse behind the curtain, and what i saw there scares me more than i can articulate.
we talk a lot about free speech in this country, about the first amendment and the marketplace of ideas, but we don’t talk as much about the infrastructure that makes participation in society possible. You need a bank account to get paid. You need a bank account to pay rent. You need a bank account to buy food, to access credit, to function in the modern economy. When that gets taken away, it doesn’t matter what rights you have on paper because you’re locked out of the systems that make those rights meaningful. And when the decision to exclude you is made by algorithms acting on criteria that are proprietary and secret, when you have no right to know who accused you or why, when the burden is on you to prove you’re not a bad person rather than on them to prove you are, that’s not freedom. That’s just a more sophisticated form of control.
i don’t know what the solution is. I’m not a policy expert. I just know that i’m different now than i was before march 14th. I self-censor more. I think twice before donating to causes i care about, before signing petitions, before posting opinions that might be controversial. I keep more cash in my safe. I’ve opened accounts at two different banks, trying to diversify my risk like i’m a portfolio instead of a person. My wife and i have talked about keeping more of our savings in physical assets, which feels paranoid until you remember that paranoia is just pattern recognition in people who’ve been burned before.
the worst part is the isolation. When this happened to me, i didn’t know who to talk to about it. I was ashamed, for one thing. There’s a stigma to having your accounts frozen that feels uncomfortably close to the stigma of being arrested, even though i hadn’t done anything wrong. And the people i did tell mostly didn’t understand. They’d say things like “just use a different bank” or “you must have done something suspicious” or “this is why i don’t mix politics and money.” They couldn’t grasp that the problem wasn’t one bank making a bad decision, it was a system that allows private companies to act as gatekeepers to economic participation based on secret criteria and political whim. They couldn’t see that this isn’t about me and my specific situation, it’s about what happens when we build a society where the infrastructure of daily life can be withdrawn as punishment for wrongthink.
i’m telling this story now because i think people need to understand that this is real, that it happens to normal people who aren’t extremists or criminals or threats to anyone. It happens to freelancers trying to pay their mortgages. It happens to parents saving for their kids’ college. It happens to people who thought they were safe because they follow the rules and stay in their lane. And once it happens, you don’t see the world the same way anymore. You realize how fragile your place in the economy really is, how conditional your participation in society has become, and how little it takes to transform a respectable citizen into a financial untouchable.
i got my accounts back, but i didn’t get my sense of security back. That disappeared somewhere between the hold music and the form letter, and i don’t think it’s coming back. I used to believe that if you were honest and worked hard and stayed out of trouble, the system would basically work for you.
now i know better.
now i know that the system works for whoever controls the algorithms, and the rest of us are just living at the mercy of their judgment. And that’s no way to live at all. |
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