Tag: National Action Network

NYT Magazine’s Mark Leibovich, National Action Network’s Reverend Al Sharpton, NYT Editorial Board member Mara Gay, and former U.S. attorney Joyce Vance on the administration’s new policy that ends protections for migrants undergoing life-saving medical care here in the U.S.…

Andrew Yang, one of the candidates who made an early entry in the 2020 field, might not have much name recognition now, but his popularity and presence have netted increased prominence among the crowded bench -- due in part to his unconventional proposals to resolve income disparity and warnings of a robot takeover of America's job sector. "I’m a capitalist," he told the New York Times in the interview that launched his campaign, "and I believe that universal basic income is necessary for capitalism to continue." (MORE: Who is running for president in 2020?) At the National Action Network conference in New York in April, the tech industry veteran underscored the importance of addressing the needs of the future -- as motivations for his candidacy. Technology and capital are "about to come and verge in historical ways," he said Wednesday, which he added will cause many jobs to disappear. (MORE: How Andrew Yang Could Win The 2020 Democratic Primary) "I was stunned when I saw the disparities between Detroit and San Francisco or Cleveland and Manhattan. Despite his under-the-radar campaign, Yang announced this month that his campaign raised $1.7 million in less than two months across February and March. 3) Yang's fundraising haul came from over 80,000 donors and followed his announcement in March that he cleared the grassroots fundraising threshold of 65,000 donors to qualify for the first Democratic primary debate. He and his brother grew up "pretty nerdy," according to Yang's campaign website. What he used to do: Yang worked a "brief stint" as a corporate lawyer before founding a failed tech startup.

DETROIT—A stage is a stage, even when it’s a church and the performance is a marathon of a funeral. Some were barnburners who brought the house down, like Rev. Jasper Williams, Jr. of Atlanta who turned her eulogy into a more than 30 minute Bill Cosby-esque “Pound Cake Speech” rant, steeped in respectability politics on the problems in the black “house,” and how it needed to become a “home.” You could feel Fox News commentators potentially salivating over his oratory as he railed against black women’s abilities to raise their sons, despite their strength and how “fine” they are. He even criticized Franklin’s religious and civil rights titan of a father, Rev. Then there was Sharpton, who was seated next to Farrakhan during the beginning of the funeral. “She sang a song for all of us,” calling her the “soundtrack for the civil rights movement.” Then Sharpton turned, and used President Donald Trump’s recent statement about Franklin’s passing, that she used to “work” for him, as a cudgel to beat the president with. “She used to perform for you, she worked for us!” railed Sharpton. He called Bill Clinton “the first black president,” something I’m sure Clinton hadn’t heard since we elected an actual black president in Barack Obama back in 2008. Ellis joked how some of the white people in attendance (a personal side-eye from me to Hillary Clinton) were clapping “on the 1 and 3” instead of the one and two. And Franklin was a queen who loved to perform, who loved her people and loved the flare for the dramatic.