Mayor Mamdani's Speech On America's 250th Birthday

This is a transcript of Mayor Mamdani's speech:

Good morning, my fellow Americans. Season after season, year after year, the tides have come in and out of New York Harbor. Long before the name “New York” had ever been spoken, Lenape dugouts crossed these currents. It was on these waters that tall masts crested the horizon, captained by explorers like Verrazzano and Hudson after whom we’ve named our bridges and rivers. And ever since, ships full of travelers weary from long journeys have passed through the Narrows, the winds of the Atlantic at their backs.

  

When those passengers lifted their heads to glimpse what lies just beyond the waves, what did they see? They saw land, lush and teeming with life. They saw men waiting at the docks to take them into bondage. They saw tenements rife with squalor. They saw industry rumbling with activity, steam and smoke rising, a city on the move. They saw a towering monument to freedom, her torch glowing world-wide welcome. They saw New York City. They saw America.

  

Tomorrow, our nation marks 250 years since we declared our independence. Two hundred and fifty years of a grand experiment in self-governance — an experiment so audacious that some in 1776 doubted it would last more than a few years, let alone a quarter of a millennium. From Lexington to Los Angeles, Selma to Seneca Falls, Morrisania to Midwood, Americans will come together for a day, just as we do each year. Families will gather around the grill. Fireworks will fill the night sky. This will be no ordinary day of celebration. Two hundred and fifty years presents a rare opportunity for more than 340 million people to turn together — both towards one another and towards ourselves, to take measure of who we are as a nation. When we look at America, what do we see?

  

Here at City Hall, as I sit behind George Washington’s desk, alongside new Americans who came to this country, I cannot see all of America. But like so many who came before, I can see New York City. 

 

The city I see today looks very different than the one that greeted George Washington. In July of 1776, our city simmered under the yoke of oppression. The British had imposed a colonial rule so repressive that 250 years ago, 80 miles south, a small group of newspaper editors, farmers, and soldiers signed their names on a document declaring truths that feel self-evident now but were revolutionary then, establishing the ideals our nation still strives to fulfill.

  

The British did not take it well. War broke out. And that August, as the largest battle of the Revolutionary War unfolded in Brooklyn, batteries on Governors Island took aim at British ships anchored just offshore. We were outgunned, we were outmanned and we were soundly defeated. After only a few months, it appeared our fledgling attempt at democracy was on the precipice of collapse.

  

But that night, with the moon overhead, thousands of our soldiers silently climbed into ferries and flat-bottomed boats and escaped to Manhattan. The Continental Army survived to fight another day. Independence may have been declared in Philadelphia, but it was rescued in New York City. George Washington was the last to leave Brooklyn. As he waited at the river’s edge, the sun beginning its rise, he would have looked out over New York City’s waters and seen what so many have seen in the 250 years since — an opportunity to begin anew. Those opportunities — like everything in New York City — are not given. They are won. 

 

In 1838, 11 years after New York outlawed slavery, a recently emancipated Black man by the name of James Weeks sought to begin anew as well — and to help hundreds of others do the same. He bought property in Brooklyn, won himself the right to vote, and sold lots to others newly freed. When they landed in New York Harbor, they knew they had something waiting for them that they had never had before: a home. Weeksville still stands today — a living, breathing testament to what we know America to be: a place each of us has the power to make.

  

The Harbor was busy those years, as ships poured in from around the world. Hundreds of thousands of Irish immigrants arrived with stomachs aching from a famine manufactured by imperial cruelty. Chinese sailors settled in what is today, Chinatown. Millions more traveled under the Statue of Liberty and through Ellis Island — Jewish people escaping pogroms, Italians fleeing poverty, Syrians seeking economic opportunity.

  

Each of these new arrivals peered through portholes onto a city that was changing as fast as the nation. They saw merchants peddling their wares on the docks, streets being laid out on a grid, buildings rising into the clouds. They could not yet see the nativism they would face — the jobs they would be refused, the landlords who would not rent to them, and the abject labor and living conditions they would withstand. But no matter how much smog hung over the harbor, they still saw an opportunity to begin anew. 

 

Over the years that followed, despite laws enacted by the federal government to bar their entry, despite sweatshop fires that killed hundreds of women, despite riots aimed at their very existence, immigrants made homes here in New York City, and they helped to make New York City. That legacy of every generation of Americans insisting that the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness extends to them, too, is no relic of the past. It carried millions of Black Americans north during the Great Migration; it drew hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans to New York City after the Second World War; it invited countless others from the West Indies, and South Asia, and West Africa, and across the world. And it is what brought my family to this city when I was seven years old. 

 

My family did not arrive by boat, although we saw the Statue of Liberty from the window of the plane. Even from the air, we could make out the promise of America — the promise of the beautiful, patriotic work of rendering America, year after year, a little more faithful to its founding ideals. There is a term so often used to describe our nation and those who have shaped it: American exceptionalism. American exceptionalism, the conventional wisdom tells us, makes our freedom a little more free, is how we dug the Erie Canal and irrigated the West, is why children in faraway lands grow up dreaming of one day moving here. 

 

And yet the irony is that the story of America has so often been written by those who were told by others with power and influence and wealth that they were anything but exceptional. For generation after generation, we have been told that when the world has sent its people to our shores, it has not sent its best. It sent Puritans and Sikhs and Quakers and Muslims and Jewish people who were banished for praying the wrong way, worshipping the wrong Gods, angering the wrong people. It sent peasants and serfs from slums and shtetls who were treated as less because they hardly owned clothes, let alone land. It sent immigrants for whom power was something someone else had. We are told that America is exceptional because we are richer, stronger, more powerful than everyone else. 

 

The truth, my friends, is that America is exceptional because here, nothing is fixed into place. The frontier may be closed, we may have walked on the moon, but the work of fulfilling the values first enshrined in the Declaration of Independence — that work endures, my friends, and it belongs to us all. It belongs too to our newest Americans, those standing here with me today, all of whom were recently naturalized. Nearly a decade ago, I too felt what you feel — the joy of no longer being just a New Yorker, but an American too. You each hold a special power. The power to determine what America means. 

 

The powerful have always known their answer. America, in their view, is an arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal. America, if you ask them, becomes less the more people it welcomes. America, they will tell you, belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin. The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit.

  

How small they are, how weak, how unoriginal. At every moment in our past, those who led through exclusion and isolation have tried to win power and enrich themselves by turning us against one another. Division is the oldest trick in politics, and the cheapest. But time and again — including 250 years ago — those forces of division have been vanquished by the forces of progress. As Thomas Paine once wrote, “this new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty [...] hither have they fled.” And yet today, too many of our leaders do not believe in a vision of this nation as an asylum for the persecuted — but rather as one that persecutes those seeking asylum. As we mark 250 years, what do we see?

  

We see a city of contradictions within a nation of contradictions. We see the wealthiest country in the history of the world — one where children go to sleep hungry while the world’s first trillionaire hungers for more. We see monopolies that dominate every industry and oligarchs who buy elections. We see masked agents terrorizing our streets, eating food cooked by our undocumented neighbors before spiriting them away in unmarked vans. We see a nation whose immense wealth has been built by those with calloused, dirt-streaked hands — those who toil on factory floors and chisel into stone — and we see a nation that has allowed so much of that wealth to be held instead in the soft hands of a precious few.

  

Yes, we see America in a health insurance industry that exploits the sick, but that is not all I see when we look for America. We see it too in the nurse who works a double shift and then stops on her way home to check on an ailing neighbor. 

 

Yes, we see America in corporate landlords for whom negligence is a business model. We see it too in the father who tucks his children into bed beneath a ceiling stained with leaks, who wakes before dawn to go to work and still believes his country can do better by his family. 

 

Yes, we see America when we spend our tax dollars on bombs and bailouts, when we sell our elections to the highest bidder. Yet we see it just as clearly in every American who still believes this country belongs to we, the people.

  

We see America each time neighbors link arms with neighbors — without asking how long they have lived here, or what papers they have — as ICE invades our neighborhoods.

  

We see America each time those young and old stand in the beating rain or the stifling heat to cast their ballots.

  

We see America each time working people demand more — not just for themselves, but for their fellow Americans. 

 

There are some who respond to those who ask for more from America with a simple refrain: “Love it or leave it,” they say. But patriotism has never been about pretending our nation is without flaws. Patriotism is every act of righteous dissent, it is every march led under the heavy sun, it is every protest held a decade before its time. It is precisely because we love this nation that we will not leave it. After all, who loves America more than those who have sacrificed so much to make it free? 

   

Today, I think not only of the Fourth of July — I think too of the ninth of July. Five days after the Declaration of Independence was signed, it arrived here in New York City. Redcoats had disembarked on Staten Island. More than a hundred British ships loomed just offshore. Across this city, the Continental Army prepared for an invasion. George Washington commanded his brigades to assemble just a few feet from this building. It was known then as the Commons — today, we call it City Hall Park.

  

There, within range of British guns, Washington ordered his generals to read the Declaration aloud. And with the world’s mightiest empire poised to attack, Washington told the people of New York City what we will celebrate tomorrow — that we had declared our independence. That freedom was within reach. That evening, danger loomed. Conflict was not a question but a certainty. And yet when those early New Yorkers marched toward the statue of King George III that stood in Bowling Green, a statue they would melt down into bullets for their young army, they walked in unison — grounded not in the pursuit of plunder, but in ideals that for the first time had a name: America. 

 

Those ideals upon which our nation was built — they are strong enough to endure any authoritarian regime, but only if we reach for them. Ours is a nation working each day towards the perfection in which it was conceived. A nation striving each day to better itself. Therein lies the work of America — the striving, the bettering, the reaching towards perfection.

  

What a privilege each of us has, to live in a nation that every one of its inhabitants can shape. What a responsibility each of us possesses, to prove ourselves worthy of all those who came before. What power each of us holds, to bring America ever-closer to the greatness so many have seen when they looked upon these shores — the greatness that, for 250 years, has been America.

  

Thank you. God Bless America, God Bless New York City, and happy Fourth of July.  

Five Charts From Ipsos Polling Regarding The Nation's 250th Birthday

 

From Ipsos.com.

The Country's 250th Birthday - A Time To Celebrate Or Mourn?

 

Robert Reich comments on the country's impending 250th birthday:

For the next seven days, most of America will be engaged in celebrating the birth of our nation 250 years ago.

 

Trump wants to use this occasion for his insatiable ego by putting his name and face everywhere he can. His grandiosity is boundless; his narcissism, loathsome.

Others may use the anniversary to celebrate the good things America has accomplished over two and a half centuries. Fine.

 

But a true understanding of where America has come at this point in our history would see the current danger to the ideals we’ve striven for — the wanton attacks on democracy, freedom, the rule of law, and equal opportunity, by people asserting white Christian nationalism.

 

That attack has been spearheaded by Trump and abetted by spineless Republicans in the House and Senate, a small-minded Supreme Court majority, and a blight of billionaires who are bankrolling much of this for personal gain. They are all traitors to those ideals.

 

America’s ideals have never been fully achieved, of course, but the effort to achieve them has been noble; it has inspired much of the world. That effort had been our nation’s purpose, the core of our moral authority. 

Those ideals haven’t died, but the effort to achieve them is on life support. 

I wish I could feel celebratory, but I don’t. To me, the darkness that has befallen our country doesn’t call for celebration or self-congratulation — not this week, nor as long as the darkness prevails. It calls for a clear-eyed determination to renew the effort to achieve our ideals — our moral rudder — and thereby take America back.

Instead of celebrating the 250th anniversary of America, I for one will be mourning the loss of our national purpose. I’ll be wearing a black armband to signify my sorrow.

Some Of The Things Trump Has Ruined As He Turns 80

In "honor" of Trump turning 80 years-old, Really American provides a list of some of the things he has ruined:

In honor of the occasion, here is a brief and incomplete accounting of what the 47th president of the United States has done to this country, its institutions, its landmarks, and its people in the past 18 months.

He started a war with Iran that is now in its 103rd day, has cost at least $29 billion, killed 13 American troops, injured more than 400, pushed inflation to a three-year high, sent gas to $4.32 a gallon, closed the Strait of Hormuz, and killed 3 Indian sailors in a strike on a tanker this week. He said he loves the inflation. He said he doesn’t think about Americans’ financial situation. He said he doesn’t care about the midterms.

He tried to put his name on the Kennedy Center. A judge said no. His name came off at 3am Friday behind white tarps while crowds chanted “take it down.” He tried to close it for two years. A judge said no. He fired the board and replaced them with loyalists. A court restored voting rights to the members he tried to silence. The Washington National Opera is now suing for $17 million in donations never returned.

He created a $1.8 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund by suing his own agency, settling with himself, and directing taxpayer money to his allies. A judge permanently blocked it. He still calls it a great idea. He gave himself permanent IRS audit immunity in the same deal. That part is still in place.

He installed Bari Weiss at CBS News. She fired Scott Pelley for refusing to inject falsehoods into his reporting. She fired the executive producer. She let Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega go. She cancelled Colbert. She installed a tech blogger to run 60 Minutes. His DOJ just approved her taking over CNN too.

He appointed a housing finance regulator with no intelligence experience to run all 18 US intelligence agencies. Seven Republican senators blocked the FISA surveillance program over it. He backed down and nominated someone else. He told the original pick to start firing people and described him as “less shackled”because he had not been confirmed.

He said he loves the inflation. He said he could bulldoze the Statue of Liberty. He tried to paint the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool “American flag blue” for $14 million. It grew algae the next day. He wants to build a “Trump Promenade” at the Lincoln Memorial. He proposed a 250-foot triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery. He is building a six-story underground fortress beneath a ballroom on the White House lawn.

He fell asleep at the NBA Finals. He fell asleep in the Oval Office during a coal briefing. He fell asleep at a Wisconsin farmers roundtable while they were praising him. Marco Rubio denied under oath that Trump falls asleep in meetings. Rubio was then shown video of Trump falling asleep in a meeting. In the same meeting where Rubio was praising him.

His family made $2.3 billion from crypto ventures while retail investors lost the same amount. His son-in-law is building a $1.6 billion luxury resort on protected Mediterranean wetlands in Albania backed by Saudi money while simultaneously serving as Middle East envoy. His son’s drone company received a $620 millionPentagon contract. He bought TKO stock before announcing the White House UFC fight.

He said the Kennedy Center was dying. He ruined it. He said the reflecting pool was broken. He painted it and it grew algae. He said Iran would be dealt with in weeks. It has been 103 days. He said a deal was coming in two or three days 38 times.

He turns 80. His friends say he can hear the clock ticking. Many of us can too.

Americans (Including Republicans) Say NO To A Trump Holiday

The chart above reflects the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll - done between February 23rd and 25th of a nationwide sample of 1,604 adults (including 1,444 registered voters). The margin of error is 3.4 points.
 

The Internet Turns 25 Years Old Amid Huge Success

In less than two weeks, the internet will turn 25 years old -- to say say it has been a success would be an understatement. It is now used by a huge majority of Americans (and in other countries as well). Here's how the Pew Research Center recounts the birth of the internet:

Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote a paper on March 12, 1989 proposing an “information management” system that became the conceptual and architectural structure for the Web.  He eventually released the code for his system—for free—to the world on Christmas Day in 1990. It became a milestone in easing the way for ordinary people to access documents and interact over a network of computers called the internet—a system that linked computers and that had been around for years. The Web became especially appealing after Web browsers were perfected in the early 1990s to facilitate graphical displays of pages on those linked computers.

In 1995, only about 14% of the population in the United States were users of the internet. Today internet usage has exploded to include 87% of the population -- a phenomenal growth. And as the chart below shows, there is no group in our society that does not have a majority using the internet in 2014.

It is interesting that some demographic differences have a fairly wide gap in internet use, while others don't. It turns out that where a person lives (urban, suburban, rural) doesn't affect internet usage, and neither does race or ethnicity and sex. But other factors do matter. Those making over $75,000 a year have a much larger internet usage than those making under $30,000 a year (a difference of about 22 points). College graduates also have a significantly higher internet usage than those with a high school diploma or less (a 21 point difference).

But the biggest difference comes in the different age groups. Those 65 and over, a group that grew up before the internet was invented, has significantly less internet usage than the between 18 and 29 years old group (the first group to grow up with the internet being a reality). There is a 40 point difference between these two groups.

This Pew Research Center survey was done between January 9th and 12th of this year of 1,006 nationwide adults, and has a margin of error of about 3.5 points.

Old Enough To Have Been There

I found this picture at the blog of Yellowdog Granny, and I liked it a lot. That's because I'm old enough to correct a few history professors myself. Today is my birthday, and according to the federal government I'm officially an old fart now -- with Medicare and everything. Oh well, I guess it's better than the only available alternative.

Happy Birthday To "The Amazing Randi"

Once again I'm a day late, but I didn't want to pass up the opportunity to wish a happy birthday to one of my major heroes -- James Randi. Randi had a distinguished and very successful career as a stage magician, calling himself The Amazing Randi. But he is most remembered today for the career he chose after he retired at the age of 60.

After retiring, he established the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF). Through the JREF he has exposed countless numbers of psychics, faith healers, diviners, mediums, astrologers, homeopaths, and others who claim paranormal powers. For many years the JREF has offered a $1 million payment to anyone who can demonstrate a paranormal power that can't be explained by science or duplicated by Randi using stage magic. To date, no one has earned that prize.

Randi has always been a brave and steadfast voice for reason and reality. Yesterday he celebrated his 83rd birthday. I hope it was a happy one, and that he has many more.

Happy Birthday Tommy Chong !

I'm a couple of days late on this, and I apologize for that. But the great Tommy Chong had another birthday on April 24th. This great actor and comedian has long been a spokesman for the legalization of marijuana, and he recently joined the Marijuana Policy Project's VIP Advisory Board. He has requested that any birthday presents be in the form of a donation to the MPP in his honor. He says:

What I want is to see marijuana legal in my lifetime.


I know what you're thinking. "Tommy, after 74 years of marijuana being illegal and 100,000s of marijuana arrests every year, how could we possibly forget your birthday?" I know, right? You can make it up to me by helping turn my dream into a reality.


These ballots aren't going to initiate themselves! Please help make my birthday wish come true and support the work of the Marijuana Policy Project. Thanks, man.

The Truth About St. Ronnie

Today would have been the 100th birthday of former president Ronald Reagan. Since his presidency, and especially since his death, he has been elevated to icon status among right-wingers. Hell, if they could make him a saint they would have already done so. But the Ronald Reagan celebrated by modern right-wingers bears little resemblance to the real man.

Ronald Reagan was a conservative. There is no doubt about that. But he was an old-style traditional conservative, and had he followed the same policies today that he did while governor and president he would have been reviled and rejected by the ultra-right-wing teabaggers of the modern Republican Party.

While talking about smaller government, he grew the government and the national debt and deficit. He also raised taxes, both as a governor and a president (and his tax rate while president was higher than the current rate under President Obama). And while he preached about the evils of unions (and busted the air traffic controllers union), he didn't mind accepting the benefits afforded him as a member of a union (Screen Actors Guild) and even served as president of his actor's union.

Think Progress has come up with 10 Things Conservatives Don't Want You To Know About Reagan. I think it would be more appropriately titled 10 Things Conservatives Would Like To Forget About Reagan, because if they admit these things to themselves they would have to take him down from his saintly pedestal. Here are the 10 things they listed:

1. Reagan was a serial tax raiser. As governor of California, Reagan “signed into law the largest tax increase in the history of any state up till then.” Meanwhile, state spending nearly doubled. As president, Reagan “raised taxes in seven of his eight years in office,” including four times in just two years. As former GOP Senator Alan Simpson, who called Reagan “a dear friend,” told NPR, “Ronald Reagan raised taxes 11 times in his administration — I was there.” “Reagan was never afraid to raise taxes,” said historian Douglas Brinkley, who edited Reagan’s memoir. Reagan the anti-tax zealot is “false mythology,” Brinkley said.

2. Reagan nearly tripled the federal budget deficit. During the Reagan years, the debt increased to nearly $3 trillion, “roughly three times as much as the first 80 years of the century had done altogether.” Reagan enacted a major tax cut his first year in office and government revenue dropped off precipitously. Despite the conservative myth that tax cuts somehow increase revenue, the government went deeper into debt and Reagan had to raise taxes just a year after he enacted his tax cut. Despite ten more tax hikes on everything from gasoline to corporate income, Reagan was never able to get the deficit under control.

3. Unemployment soared after Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts. Unemploymentjumped to 10.8 percent after Reagan enacted his much-touted tax cut, and it took years for the rate to get back down to its previous level. Meanwhile,income inequality exploded. Despite the myth that Reagan presided over an era of unmatched economic boom for all Americans, Reagan disproportionately taxed the poor and middle class, but the economic growth of the 1980′s did little help them. “Since 1980, median household income has risen only 30 percent, adjusted for inflation, while average incomes at the top have tripled or quadrupled,” the New York Times’ David Leonhardt noted.

4. Reagan grew the size of the federal government tremendously. Reagan promised “to move boldly, decisively, and quickly to control the runaway growth of federal spending,” but federal spending “ballooned” under Reagan. He bailed out Social Security in 1983 after attempting to privatize it, and set up a progressive taxation system to keep it funded into the future. He promised to cut government agencies like the Department of Energy and Education but ended up adding one of the largest — the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, which today has a budget of nearly $90 billion and close to300,000 employees. He also hiked defense spending by over $100 billion a year to a level not seen since the height of the Vietnam war.

5. Reagan did little to fight a woman’s right to chose. As governor of California in 1967, Reagan signed a bill to liberalize the state’s abortion laws that “resulted in more than a million abortions.” When Reagan ran for president, he advocated a constitutional amendment that would have prohibited all abortions except when necessary to save the life of the mother, but once in office, he “never seriously pursued” curbing choice.

6. Reagan was a “bellicose peacenik.” He wrote in his memoirs that “[m]y dream…became a world free of nuclear weapons.” “This vision stemmed from the president’s belief that the biblical account of Armageddon prophesied nuclear war — and that apocalypse could be averted if everyone, especially the Soviets, eliminated nuclear weapons,” the Washington Monthly noted. And Reagan’s military buildup was meant to crush the Soviet Union, but “also to put the United States in a stronger position from which to establish effective arms control” for the the entire world — a vision acted out by Regean’s vice president, George H.W. Bush, when he became president.

7. Reagan gave amnesty to 3 million undocumented immigrants. Reagan signed into law a bill that made any immigrant who had entered the country before 1982 eligible for amnesty. The bill was sold as a crackdown, but its tough sanctions on employers who hired undocumented immigrants were removed before final passage. The bill helped 3 million people and millions more family members gain American residency. It has since become a source of major embarrassment for conservatives.

8. Reagan illegally funneled weapons to Iran. Reagan and other senior U.S. officials secretly sold arms to officials in Iran, which was subject to a an arms embargo at the time, in exchange for American hostages. Some funds from the illegal arms sales also went to fund anti-Communist rebels in Nicaragua — something Congress had already prohibited the administration from doing. When the deals went public, the Iran-Contra Affair, as it came to be know, was an enormous political scandal that forced several senior administration officials to resign.

9. Reagan vetoed a comprehensive anti-Apartheid act. which placed sanctions on South Africa and cut off all American trade with the country. Reagan’s veto was overridden by the Republican-controlled Senate. Reagan responded by saying “I deeply regret that Congress has seen fit to override my veto,” saying that the law “will not solve the serious problems that plague that country.”

10. Reagan helped create the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. Reagan fought a proxy war with the Soviet Union by training, arming, equipping, and funding Islamist mujahidin fighters in Afghanistan. Reagan funneled billions of dollars, along with top-secret intelligence and sophisticated weaponry to these fighters through the Pakistani intelligence service. The Talbian and Osama Bin Laden — a prominent mujahidin commander — emerged from these mujahidin groups Reagan helped create, and U.S. policy towards Pakistan remains strained because of the intelligence services’ close relations to these fighters. In fact, Reagan’s decision to continue the proxy war after the Soviets were willing to retreat played a direct role in Bin Laden’s ascendency.