JAY-Z vs DONALD TRUMP (RACISM & JOBS)

JAY-Z vs DONALD TRUMP (RACISM & JOBS):

TWO RICH NATIVE NEW YORKERS AT ODDS.

TWO DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES BASED ON RACE & ECONOMICS.


Sources: CNN, Yahoo News, Youtube


******* Trump hits back at Jay-Z after rapper dismissed his claims about black unemployment

In an interview with CNN’s Van Jones that aired Saturday night, Jay-Z — whose birth name is Shawn Carter — said that the numbers don’t matter.

“It’s not about money at the end of the day,” said Carter, whose net worth is estimated to be $810 million. “Money doesn’t equate to happiness. It doesn’t. That’s missing the whole point. You treat people like human beings then — that’s the main point.”

Carter also criticized the disparaging remarks Trump reportedly made about African countries during an Oval Office meeting on immigration this month.

“It is disappointing and it’s hurtful,” Carter said. “It really is hurtful, more than so … everyone feels anger. But after the anger, it’s real hurtful. It’s looking down at a whole population of people, and it’s so misinformed because these places have beautiful people and beautiful everything. This is the leader of the free world speaking like this.”

DEMOCRATS LEAVE ME NO CHOICE IN 2016; VAN JONES ADMITS DEMS ARE IN TROUBLE

DEMOCRATS LEAVE ME NO CHOICE IN 2016:

VAN JONES ADMITS DEMOCRATS ARE IN TROUBLE.

BLACK VOTERS ARE TIRED OF UNEMPLOYMENT & POLITICAL RETALIATION.

Due to an extremely Liberal, Divisive agenda which offers very few SOLUTIONS and OPPORTUNITIES for BLACK voters to experience Success in America, DEMOCRATS are leaving BLACK voters no choice but to support GOP candidates come Nov 2016.

BLACK voters are also tired of being victims of Political RETALIATION from the DEMOCRAT party.

~ Democratic Strategist Van Jones Talks About the Black Vote in 2016…and It’s Not Good News for His Party (Article date Oct 2015)

CNN political contributor Van Jones didn’t mince words when giving his assessment of the Democratic party ahead of their first 2016 presidential debate Tuesday night:

“I think this whole party has a problem. 

This is the whitest field that we have seen since 1992. There’s no Sharpton. There’s no Carol Moseley Braun. There’s no non-white people there, and this is a party that has to get, not 60%, not 70%, not 90%, but 94% of the black vote to win. 

This is a big problem for the whole party.”

Some on Twitter agreed when they saw the candidates take the stage for the Democratic debate:

Jones, a former green energy advisor in the Obama administration, went on to suggest that there’s room for the Democratic party to improve its numbers with minority voters:

“The Clintons get the black vote by default, but nobody has made a case yet that they can do better. If Biden gets in he might be able to make that case. But Bernie Sanders has so much room to grow with the black vote he should take the opportunity tomorrow to make his case why a white guy from Vermont should get the support of a party with that much black participation.”

GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson has argued that the Republican party has a lot to offer black Americans.

Carson also said the GOP is more willing to get past racism:

“I find black Republicans are treated extremely well in the Republican Party. I hear a lot about what you believe and the kind of principles you’re espousing and I think that’s far more important. I think the Republicans have done a far better job than Democrats in getting over racism.”

Star Parker, founder of CURE (Center for Urban Renewal and Education), believes the GOP should court black voters by focusing on traditional values:

“An ongoing point of contention in the Republican Party has been the extent to which clear identification with traditional Judeo-Christian values is a good idea.

My sense is that, when we add to the equation the growing impact of non-white voters, standing strongly for these traditional values — which would put Republicans in stark contrast to Democrats — would be a win-win for Republicans.”

One thing is certain: with another close election likely, both parties should realize the impact minority voters will have on determining the winner.

Sources: Independent Journal, Mediatate, YouTube

Green Jobs For All! Green Living & Urban America!

"Green For All"! (Van Jones' Organization) Urban Farming, Producing Green Jobs, Green Living & Clean Living Opportunities has finally come To Urban America! Its time for the American Black Community to Get a piece of this "Green" Pie! (i.e., MONEY) President Obama & Van Jones have already Opened the doors. We just Need to Walk through them!

Van Jones introduced Black People to the "Clean Way, Green Way" Business Concept. He also discusses how Black Entrepreneurs can Produce Green Jobs and teaches on the Benefits of Urban Farming & Eco-Equity to the American Black Community.

What about Hosting or Launching a "Green The Block" Party in your Community in order to Educate and Introduce Green Living/ Green Jobs Business Opportunities to Black People (including Black Business Owners) in your region?

Just a thought.

Peace










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Sources: Green For All, Youtube, Google Maps

Van Jones: Eco-Equity, Green Jobs & Urban Renewal (Videos)

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Sources: Whitehouse.gov, Youtube, Google Maps

Van Jones Returns, Loves Glenn Beck, Pushes Green Jobs

Van Jones Returns, Sends Glenn Beck Love


Six months after leaving the Obama administration, former green jobs czar Van Jones is staging a public comeback, directing his love at the Republicans who helped pushed him out of the administration – whether they want it or not.

Jones, who left the administration last September amidst questions from Fox host Glenn Beck and others on the right about his politics before joining the administration, was finally pushed to resign after the emergence of a petition he'd signed supporting the Sept. 11 "truth movement."

His return to the public stage began Wednesday, when the founder of the advocacy group Green for All was named a senior fellow at the Green Opportunity Initiative at the progressive Center for American Progress, and separately appointed as a fellow at Princeton University, teaching environmental and economic policy.

Jones also took to the airwaves, visiting with some prominent African-American commentators to promote his green agenda.

His message: Republicans – who called for his head just six months ago and who, before accepting his White House job – could work with Democrats to promote a green jobs initiative.

"Conservatives should be really happy because we're talking about enterprise," Jones told Roland Martin of his green plans Sunday on TV One's "Washington Watch."

In an unexpected outpouring, Jones gave props to Beck at the NAACP Image Awards on Friday, delivering a message to his “fellow countryman” while accepting the President’s Award for his work on green initiatives.

“I see you, and I love you, brother. I love you and you cannot do anything about it. I love you and you cannot do anything about it,” Jones said. “Let’s be one country. Let’s be one country. Let’s get the job done.”

(Beck returned the love shot on Twitter: “I love you too,Glad to all live in one country.Will it be the founders country or the one you pushed when with storm?”)

Speaking the same day to Suzanne Malveaux on CNN, Jones recalled a recent speech of his that tea partiers attended, where someone “on the front row, like, you know, mad-dogging me and I started talking. I started talking about American jobs and the future and how we can be one country, and the guy's book starts getting lower and lower and lower, and at the end of the speech, he came up and asked me to sign Glenn Beck's book.

Asked what he wrote, Jones said, “We are one country, Van Jones.”

For weeks before Jones's resignation, Beck had led the charge against Jones, accusing him of being a communist because of his affiliation with a 1990s anti-war group called Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement. Jones was the founder of a group, Color of Change, that had pushed for a successful advertising boycott of Beck's show after Beck had already twice criticized Jones on the air.

Jones repeatedly denied Beck's charges, but the talker has stuck to his guns. During the annual Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this month, Beck repeated the charge that Jones is a "self-described" communist.

When Jones resigned last September, he released a statement acknowledging the right's role in his departure after Republicans aired several inflammatory comments he'd made over the years. In addition to the 9/11 petition question, Jones also drew fire for calling Republicans "a-holes."

"On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me. They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide," Jones said.

In an interview with PBS's Tavis Smiley Thursday, Jones revisited how he ended up signing a petition calling for an investigation of the Bush administration role in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. During his interview with Smiley, Jones called the whole debacle a misunderstanding in which his name was put on a petition - one that he says he never actually saw.

Jones said some people approached him at a conference saying they represented 9/11 families and said, " 'Will you help us?' I said, 'Sure, whatever you want.'

"And then these people, I didn't know what their agenda was, they went and put my name on some abhorrent, crazy language they never showed me, I never saw. And it just sat there on this website for years," Jones said on the program.

On "Washington Watch," Jones reiterated that he willingly stepped down, saying that he felt that the controversy surrounding him was distracting attention away from the health care debate.

"I chose to resign because I was becoming a distraction," Jones said. "There were things I had said done in my past that were being confused."

Sources: Politico, Think Progress, NAACP, Twitter, Youtube

Obama White House Throwing Loyalists Under The Bus...Clean Gov't, "Restructuring" Or Ruthlessness?

PRES. OBAMA ON ACORN: NOT SOMETHING I'M FOLLOWING CLOSELY

On ABC, George Stephanopoulos pressed President Obama on the recent controversy surrounding the community group ACORN. Here's the full exchange:

STEPHANOPOULOS: How about the funding for ACORN?

PRES. OBAMA: You know, if -- frankly, it's not really something I've followed closely. I didn't even know that ACORN was getting a whole lot of federal money.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Both the Senate and the House have voted to cut it off.

PRES. OBAMA: You know, what I know is, is that what I saw on that video was certainly inappropriate and deserves to be investigated.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So you're not committing to -- to cut off the federal funding?

PRES. OBAMA: George, this is not the biggest issue facing the country. It's not something I'm paying a lot of attention to.




The Boys Under the Bus


White House Counsel Greg Craig was just the latest Obama loyalist to be sacrificed for political expediency. Lloyd Grove tallies up the body count so far.


Presidents of the United States—all presidents—tend to adopt a clinically utilitarian view of the people who serve them. They burn through their staffs like rocket fuel, a White House observer once noted. In his readiness to discard underlings who are no longer useful to him, or otherwise have passed their sell-by dates, Barack Obama is no different from his predecessors. But he’s arguably more unsentimental than most about the unpleasant necessity of throwing friends and allies under the bus.

As Jacob Weisberg wrote recently in Slate, “Obama has a healthy disdain for the overrated virtue of political loyalty… If you're useful, you can hang around with him. If you start to look like a liability, enjoy your time with the wolves…The president is catlike also in his lack of evident affection for the people who take care of him.” Certainly he’s no Bill Clinton—whose eyes were apt to well up while his lower lip trembled, occasionally punctuated by a consoling hug, as he did what had to be done.

Defenestrated White House Counsel Gregory Craig—a crucial early supporter of Obama’s long-shot candidacy, who became a lightning rod for critics of White House efforts to close the terrorist prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba—is only the latest loyalist to be sacrificed on the altar of political expediency. He surely won’t be the last.

Herewith, The Daily Beast’s official scorecard of the body count so far:


GREGORY CRAIG

The 64-year-old Craig was a Washington wise man, having enjoyed a stellar career in politics, policy, and the law before President Obama tapped him to be his top legal adviser in the White House. A partner at the powerhouse firm of Williams & Connolly, Craig had been a trusted aide and confidante of Sen. Ted Kennedy, a top policymaker in Bill Clinton’s State Department and ultimately Clinton’s impeachment lawyer before he became enthralled by the freshman senator from Illinois. Craig’s early support lent Obama’s presidential ambition a degree of Washington street cred that it might otherwise have lacked. Indeed, Craig’s support was one of the factors that led to Kennedy’s game-changing endorsement. On Friday—after months of toxic leaks to the press from anonymous White House aides questioning Craig’s handling of politically sensitive Guantanamo Bay matters, among others—he was forced to resign in humiliating fashion. The president, on his way to Asia, issued an anodyne statement of thanks and appreciation, but the damage to Craig’s reputation was done.


CASSANDRA BUTTS

A close friend of the president’s from Harvard Law School, Butts was at least afforded a soft landing when she was removed Nov. 6 as deputy White House counsel—a week before Greg Craig’s forced resignation. Butts was named to the wordy post of “senior adviser in the office of the chief executive officer at the Millennium Challenge Corporation”—compared to the West Wing, a governmental backwater—with the vague mission of “combating global poverty.”


JAMES A. JOHNSON

When he was at the height of his power in the mid-1990s, former Democratic political operative and Walter Mondale aide Jim Johnson was nicknamed “Chairman of the Universe.” He simultaneously ran the Brookings Institution, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and the home mortgage behemoth Fannie Mae. He was a pillar of the Washington establishment who had gotten rich in business while becoming a generous philanthropist. Johnson was frequently touted as a potential Treasury secretary in a future Democratic administration—probably the Obama administration. It looked like all-systems-go in June 2008 when the freshly victorious candidate promptly tapped his loyal supporter to lead his vice-presidential vetting team—the sensitive, all-important task of assessing prospective running mates. And then, just as quickly—after press reports of low-interest personal loans Johnson had obtained as a friend of embattled Countrywide mortgage chief Angelo Mozilo—Obama kicked him to the curb.


TOM DASCHLE

The former Senate Majority Leader—who lost his 2004 reelection bid in South Dakota—was national co-chairman of the Obama campaign, a key policy adviser, especially on health-care reform, and a savvy surrogate on the Sunday talk shows. When Obama’s nomination of Daschle to be secretary of Health and Human Services encountered stormy weather over his nonpayment of income taxes—and acceptance of free chauffeured limousine services, embarrassingly enough—nobody blamed the president for pulling the plug. (Daschle paid back many of the taxes, but reports suggested others remain unpaid, and a spokesperson suggested the acceptance of the free limo service was “naïve.) Some old Washington hands were rattled by Obama’s cold-eyed bluntness. “I screwed up,” the president said about the abortive nomination, over and over, in a series of television interviews on the day that Daschle was forced to withdraw.


NANCY KILLEFER

Along with Daschle’s dashed nomination, the president forced the withdrawal of business consultant Nancy Killefer, a McKinsey & Co. executive whom he had picked, with great fanfare, to be deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget while also filling the brand new role of chief performance officer in the White House. “Today was an embarrassment for us,” Obama told NBC after Killefer acknowledged a $946.69 tax lien from the District of Columbia government. It didn’t matter that she had resolved the problem years earlier; she was toast.


VAN JONES

A Yale-educated lawyer and environmental activist, as well as an ardent Obama campaign supporter, Jones was given the nominally low-profile job of White House special adviser on "green" jobs. But some intemperate statements from his past (such as “Republicans are assholes”) and ill-advised associations from his flirtation with radical politics (such as his apparent sympathy with 9/11 conspiracy theorists) provoked withering attacks on Jones and Obama from Fox News star Glenn Beck and a host of Republican office-holders. The White House let Jones fend for himself; in September he was finally forced out of his job, complaining in his resignation letter of “a vicious smear campaign against me.”


STEVE RATTNER & RICK WAGONER

After Obama tapped Steve Rattner to restructure the foundering automobile industry in February, the New York financier and Democratic fundraiser quickly shook up General Motors and Chrysler, and helped orchestrate the resignation of GM Chief Executive Rick Wagoner as that company coped with bankruptcy proceedings. With Rattner’s goals as car czar largely achieved, he reportedly had hoped to secure other Washington assignments. But the president let him leave under a cloud in July when New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo was reported to be pursuing a civil investigation into the public pension fund management business of Rattner’s Quadrangle Group.


CREIGH DEEDS

Although he had no prior relationship with the president—and, indeed, had thought it prudent to assert his independence from the Obama White House—state Senator Creigh Deeds was the 2009 Democratic nominee for governor of Virginia. The current governor, Tim Kaine, was a close friend of the president and his hand-picked chairman of the Democratic National Committee. And yet, as Deeds’ campaign started to falter, Obama’s top aides in the White House were not reluctant to trash him—to the contrary, they unloaded to The Washington Post, two weeks before the Nov. 4 election, about all the mistakes Deeds had made in the race, and how Obama couldn’t and shouldn’t be blamed for Deeds’ inevitable defeat.


DAVID PATERSON

Even the many detractors of New York’s embattled governor were surprised when the president’s operatives—led by White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and political director Patrick Gaspard—actively attempted to push David Paterson to drop out of next year’s election campaign. They were aghast that anonymous “administration officials” boasted about their efforts in a front-page story in The New York Times. “Butt out,” Harlem Rep. Charlie Rangel advised the Obama White House. So far Paterson has steadfastly refused to assume the presidentially approved position, under the bus.


ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI & ROBERT MALLEY

Zbigniew Brzezinski—Jimmy Carter’s former national security adviser and a gray eminence in the foreign-policy establishment—gave a big and early lift to Obama’s candidacy with his August 2007 endorsement. But after pro-Israel activists howled that Zbig’s presence raised troubling questions about Obama’s commitment to the Jewish state, the candidate dropped him like a hot falafel and trotted out his senior Middle East adviser, former ambassador Dennis Ross, to claim: “Brzezinski is not an adviser to the campaign.” Zbig later got his revenge, telling The Daily Beast that Obama and his “lousy staff work” badly botched his announcement of scrapping the Bush administration’s missile-defense program.

In May 2008, candidate Obama sacked foreign-policy adviser Robert Malley, a Middle East expert, after he disclosed that he’d met with the militant Palestinian group Hamas in his non-campaign-related work for the International Crisis Group, a conflict-resolution think thank. A campaign spokesman promptly declared him a non-person: “He has no formal role in the campaign and he will not play any role in the future.”


GENERAL DAVID MCKIERNAN

In May, the president had Secretary of Defense Robert Gates abruptly fire David McKiernan, the Army’s top general in Afghanistan. The ostensible reason was that McKiernan was too cautious and conventional a thinker about how to bring stability to the war-torn, corruption-plagued country that Obama had previously announced was crucial to America’s security. Now that McKiernan’s replacement—Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal—has shown himself to be anything but cautious and conventional (even preempting announced White House policy by publicly demanding tens of thousands of additional troops), there are rumblings that McChrystal is likely to be next.


BILL RICHARDSON

New Mexico’s governor provoked the enduring anger of Hillary and Bill Clinton—from whom he had received two coveted jobs, U.N. ambassador and Energy secretary—when he endorsed Obama in March 2008. Obama rewarded Richardson, a former presidential campaign rival, by nominating him to be Commerce secretary, and then threw him under the bus a month later amid reports of a federal grand jury investigation into New Mexico state contractors and their donations to Richardson’s political action committee. More than a year has passed since then, and no indictment has been forthcoming. Richardson, who fiercely maintained that he had done nothing wrong, “has seen his political fortunes crater,” according to Politico.


JEREMIAH WRIGHT & WILLIAM AYERS

“I could no more disown Reverend Wright than I could my own white grandmother,” candidate Obama famously declared in his speech on race in Philadelphia. Yes, he could! After his Chicago pastor of 20 years persisted in making incendiary statements of the “God Damn America” variety, Obama surgically cut him loose and cast him into the outer darkness. “Whatever relationship I had with Reverend Wright has changed as a consequence of this,” Obama said by way of explaining the final breach. “I don’t think that he showed much concern for me. More importantly, I don’t think he showed much concern for what we’re trying to do in this campaign and what we’re trying to do for the American people.”

Obama’s divorce from former Weatherman Bill Ayers, a friend, neighbor, and occasional political supporter from Chicago’s Hyde Park ‘hood, was far less painful but just as decisive.


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Sources: The Daily Beast, Politico, ABC News, Youtube, Google Maps