Greene County Democrat

Tag: Rep. Maxine Waters

  • Newswire : Billions ripped from Minority-Owned Firms under Trump

    By Stacy M. Brown
Black Press USA Senior National Correspondent


    The Trump administration is dismantling the very programs created to correct generations of systemic racism and economic exclusion—programs that helped level the playing field for Black, Latino, Indigenous, and women entrepreneurs. In a series of targeted assaults, Trump has moved to destroy the federal government’s most effective tools for uplifting historically disadvantaged communities, threatening billions of dollars and tens of thousands of jobs.
    In the most devastating move yet, Trump’s Justice Department filed to end the Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) Program, a nearly $37 billion affirmative action initiative that for decades guaranteed at least 10 percent of federal transportation contracts would go to minority- and women-owned firms. The administration now claims the DBE program violates the Constitution’s equal protection clause, siding with two White-owned companies that sued because they didn’t want to compete with firms led by people of color.
    If approved, the settlement would kill the DBE’s founding mission—to address the entrenched discrimination that has locked out marginalized groups from federal contracting. The Biden administration previously defended the program, recognizing that race-neutral alternatives alone cannot erase centuries of inequality. But Trump’s team reversed course, citing the Supreme Court’s ban on race-conscious college admissions to justify gutting one of the country’s last-standing economic justice efforts.

    “Today’s decision helps ensure that the voices of minority- and women-owned businesses will be heard in a case that directly threatens their opportunity to participate fairly in federally funded transportation work,” said Brooke Menschel, Senior Counsel at Democracy Forward. “With this ruling, the court has recognized what’s at stake—not just for these businesses, but for the longstanding principles of redressing past discrimination in our economy.”
    At the same time, Trump signed an executive order aimed at neutralizing the Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA)—the only federal agency solely dedicated to supporting minority-owned businesses. Under President Biden, the MBDA helped secure over $3.2 billion in contracts and $1.6 billion in capital for entrepreneurs of color, creating or preserving more than 23,000 jobs. Trump’s action, combined with a recent court ruling that barred the MBDA from considering race in program eligibility, threatens to erase those gains. “These actions are designed to kill progress,” said Rep. Maxine Waters, the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee. “This isn’t just neglect—it’s sabotage.”
    Even as Trump claims to champion small business, his policies have delivered devastating blows to those most in need. A Kentucky judge previously issued an injunction weakening the DBE program, and now Trump’s administration is making that decision permanent. Meanwhile, courts and right-wing organizations aligned with Trump are challenging the very legality of race-conscious aid, using the courts to do what Congress would never allow—turn back the clock on civil rights. In response, a coalition of minority- and women-owned business groups successfully petitioned the court to intervene. Their warning is blunt: without DBE and MBDA protections, many minority-owned firms will collapse.
    “This decision is an important step forward in the hearing of minority- and women-owned businesses who want to ensure that Congress’s laws creating and maintaining the longstanding ‘Disadvantaged Business Enterprise’ contracting program are preserved,” said Douglas L. McSwain of Wyatt, Tarrant & Combs. ”They will have the opportunity to demonstrate that the program is important and needed to help prevent ongoing discriminatory practices.”

  • Newswire : White House demands Rep. Hakeem Jeffries ‘Apologize’ for Non-Threat to ‘Fight’ Trump ‘in the Streets’

     

    Cong. Hakeem Jeffries, Democratic Minority leader in the House of Representatives addresses the press

    By Zack Linly, NewsOne

    If President Donald Trump and the MAGA-fied GOP are nothing else, they are a bottomless open bar of white tears, hypocrisy, caucasity and Karen energy. For all of their tough talk about revolution, “civil war,” the weakness of “the left,” and big, bad MAGA alfa-males, all they need to hear is anything remotely aggressive coming out of a Black person’s mouth for them to go into full snowflake mode and start crying about “violent rhetoric.”
    Recently, white conservatives have lost their damn mind over relatively benign remarks made by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), which they have intentionally misconstrued as a threat to “fight” Trump and his MAGA goons “in the street.”
    First, let’s start with what Jeffries actually said.
    “Right now, we’re going to keep focus on the need to look out for everyday New Yorkers and everyday Americans who are under assault by an extreme MAGA Republican agenda that is trying to cut taxes for billionaires, donors, and wealthy corporations and then stick New Yorkers and working-class Americans across the country with the bill,” Hakeem Jeffries said during a press conference, alongside Congressional Black Caucus Chair Yvette Clarke, where he criticized Trump’s handling of the recent air collision in Washington, D.C., including his short-lived freeze on federal funding and his absurd and factless suggestion that DEI practices had anything to do with the tragedy. “That’s not acceptable. We are going to fight it legislatively. We are going to fight it in the courts. We’re going to fight it in the streets.”
    Now, the Trump administration’s whiney-ass response:
    “While President Trump remains focused on uniting our country and delivering the mandate set by the American people, the House Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries, incites violence calling for people to fight ‘in the streets’ against President Trump’s agenda,” White House deputy press secretary Kush Desai told Fox News Digital. “This unhinged violent rhetoric is dangerous. Leader Jeffries should immediately apologize.”
    “Will Minority Leader Jeffries apologize for this disgusting threat? Or will he double down on the same calls for violence that have plagued the country for years?” White House asked in a press release.

    Right-wingers up and down social media predictably followed suit in abandoning any semblance of logic, intentionally ignoring the “fight it legislatively” and “fight it in the courts” part of Jeffrey’s speech and deciding he was making some gangsta-ass pro-riot statement just because he used the words “in the street.”

    Again, the caucasity here is just overflowing. Let’s just set aside the fact that, in 2021, Trump told Jan. 6 rioters to go to the Capitol and “fight like hell” just moments before they went to the Capitol and attacked police officers, broke through barricades, scaled walks, broke into offices and threatened legislators — all inspired by Trump’s baseless election fraud propaganda. Forget about all of that.

    Republican conservative leaders, including elected officials, spent the last two years making not-so-veiled threats of violence if Trump isn’t reelected and repeatedly insisting that any legal actions taken against their MAGA messiah could result in a second “Civil War.”

    It was only a few months ago that then candidate Trump was on stage at one of his rallies warning Kamala Harris supporters that they might get “hurt” if they happened to be in the crowd.

    Violent rhetoric has become a GOP love language since the party collectively bowed down to Trump, normalizing his childish tantrums, boorish behavior, bigoted remarks and propaganda that has proven to be dangerous. Speaking of which…
    In 2021, just a few months after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Republicans who had just gotten done protecting their MAGA cultist from being impeached for inspiring the riot, which they vehemently denied they did, tried the same white, fragile and Karen-esque nonsense with Rep. Maxine Waters that they’re trying with Jeffries now.
    Waters was speaking to protesters in Minnesota while attending a demonstration on behalf of Daunte Wright when she said she and the crowd are “looking for a guilty verdict” for Derek Chauvin, who was still on trial for the murder of George Floyd.
    “We’ve got to stay in the streets, and we’ve got to demand justice,” she said. “I am hopeful that we will get a verdict that says, ‘guilty, guilty, guilty,’ and if we don’t, we cannot go away,” she added. “We’ve got to get more confrontational.”
    Sen. Ted Cruz, one of Trump’s most passionate defenders during his second impeachment, joined other prominent Republicans in accusing Waters of “actively encouraging riots and violence,” as if it weren’t perfectly clear that she was talking about non-violent resistance.
    So, just to recap: Trump and his ilk baselessly suggest DEI caused the air collision, Hakeem Jeffries calls them out on it, Trump and his ilk disingenuously claim the angry Black man is encouraging violence — defaulting to their tried and true fearmongering against outspoken Black people — and now the White House is demanding an apology.
    Again — the real snowflakes are at it again and their caucasity continues to know no bounds. 

  • Newswire: White House says $44 Billion still available to avoid evictions

    By: Stacy M. Brown, NNPA Newswire Senior National Correspondent

    Editor Note: At press time, the CDC extended the eviction moratorium until October 3, 2021.

    House and Senate Democrats are looking to the White House to immediately act to stop evictions after the federal moratorium expired on July 31. But President Joe Biden said a recent Supreme Court ruling means the administration cannot unilaterally extend the moratorium.

    For his part, the President has called on state and local governments to resolve the problem.

    The White House said the American Rescue Plan provided $47 billion in rental assistance earlier this year, but states and localities have used just $3 billion.

    “We as a country have never had a national infrastructure or national policy preventing avoidable evictions,” American Rescue Plan Coordinator Gene Sperling responded in a White House briefing on Monday, August 2.

    “State and local governments must do more to help,” Sperling asserted. It’s not currently known just how many Americans face eviction, but leaders in the House and Senate have urged the White House to act.

    Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) said she believes about 11 million families are affected. “As they have called upon the American people to mask up, to be vaccinated and to take other public health precautions, it is critical, in recognition of this urgency, that they extend the eviction moratorium,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) stated in an August 2 letter to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    “Putting people on the streets contributes to the spread of the virus,” Pelosi wrote.

    White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki stated that the administration had taken further action to prevent Americans from experiencing eviction. Psaki said nearly 33 percent of the country wouldn’t face eviction through August.

    “Thanks to the bipartisan COVID relief act Congress passed in December 2020 and the American Rescue Plan the Biden administration enacted in March, state and local governments long ago received emergency rental assistance – a $46.5 billion plan to protect millions of Americans facing deep rental debt and potential eviction during the pandemic,” Psaki continued.

    Some cities and states have “demonstrated their ability to release these funds efficiently to tenants and landlords in need,” Psaki further insisted. “But even though funds began to be distributed in February by the Biden administration, too many states and cities have been too slow to act,” she determined.

    Psaki continued: “There is no excuse for any state or locality not to promptly deploy the resources that Congress appropriated to meet the critical need of so many Americans.

    “This assistance provides the funding to pay landlords current and back rent so tenants can remain in their homes or apartments, not be evicted.

    “No one in America should be evicted when federal funds are available, in the hands of state and local government, to pay back rent due.”

    While Congresswoman Pelosi has asked President Biden to act, Psaki said he would have strongly supported a decision by the CDC to extend the eviction moratorium.

    “Unfortunately, the Supreme Court declared on June 29 that the CDC could not grant such an extension without clear and specific congressional authorization via new legislation,” Psaki said.

    Because of the spread of the Delta variant, President Biden asked the CDC to consider executive action. The White House said he raised the prospect of a new, 30-day eviction moratorium focused on counties with high or substantial case rates.

    Psaki said the temporary measure would spur states and localities to ramp up emergency rental assistance programs to full spend – allowing every landlord to collect the rent they are owed and ensuring no eligible family gets evicted.

    “To date, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and her team have been unable to find legal authority for a new, targeted eviction moratorium,” Psaki stated.