=Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says she doesn’t take lobbyist cash. Records tell a different story==

ByRobert Schmad

November 26, 2024 2:41 pm

Ocasio-Cortez’s account description on X states that the congresswoman is “people-funded” and “takes no lobbyist [cash],” using a money bag emoji in place of the word “cash.”Despite her claim to the contrary, the representative has taken thousands of dollars in contributions from lobbyists since assuming office, according to federal records.

The congresswoman has an extensive record decrying the influence of money on politics. In 2018, shortly after winning office for the first time, Ocasio-Cortez criticizedher party’s “refusal to reject [corporate] lobbyist money.” Since then, she has called to ban members of Congress from working as lobbyists after leaving office, rebukedfellow Democrats for their close ties to lobbyists, and accused lobbyists of working to kill legislation that would benefit the public.

While Ocasio-Cortez has harsh words for lobbyists, she has accepted donations from them every year since she first took office in 2018.

Dave Koshgarian, a lobbyist with Ernst & Young, has been Ocasio-Cortez’s most consistent donor, sending her thousands of dollars beginning in 2020. Koshgarian has represented a number of corporate clients, including Duke Energy, MetLife, General Electric, Charles Schwab, and BlackRock, according to lobbying disclosures. Other clients represented by Ocasio-Cortez’s lobbyist donors include, among others, Nike, Delta Air Lines, healthcare trade associations, and the New Venture Fund, one arm of a massive Democratic-aligned dark money network managed by the Arabella Advisors consulting firm.

Ocasio-Cortez has also been critical of the presence of dark money, funds that filter into the ideological causes without a clear original donor, in politics. She has argued that dark money groups sway the Supreme Court and unethically influence policy development.

Ocasio-Cortez’s claim that she doesn’t take donations from lobbyists isn’t new, as the representative insists on social media that she swore off lobbyist cash from the very beginning. Cortez has, however, dialed down her public criticism of the lobbying industry in recent years, not making a single post on X with the words “lobby,” “lobbyist,” or “lobbying” since September 2022.

The Washington Examiner reported in April 2023 that one of TikTok’s top lobbyists sat on the board of directors of a nonprofit group advised by Ocasio-Cortez.The congresswoman vigorously fought against proposed bans on the Chinese social media platform at the time, arguing that the United States shouldn’t ban TikTok but should instead impose blanket protections against data harvesting.

“This is how corporate lobbying works,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote in May 2019. “Lobbyists ID bills they need to kill to keep profits high (no matter the human cost), come up w/ ‘sensible’ talking points to mask intent + say policy is ‘misguided,’ then schmooze policymakers in secret into accepting said talking points.”

Ocasio-Cortez’s office did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.

Happy Thanksgiving AOC, its a wonderful day to expose your lies, grift and corruption!

https://12ft.io/proxy

>>22071500

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While he would not be able to dismantle the Department of Education on his own, a bill has already been introduced by Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota that would reassign the department’s programs to other agencies. The bill faces high hurdles to passing and would require 60 votes in the Senate.

Federal funding comprises just about 10% of most local school districts’ overall budgets on average, said Qubilah Huddleston, who leads policy on equitable school funding for EdTrust, a Washington D.C. think tank focused on education. While access to public education is guaranteed to all students through state constitutions, the federal government’s role is often to ensure specific student populations are being served.

Low-income students, students with disabilities, and students learning English in Oakland are all beneficiaries of federal education funding on the K-12 level.

“Primarily, the federal government’s job is to ensure that certain student groups receive additional funding,” Huddleston told The Oaklandside. “Federal funding is meant to go on top of what states are already doing.”

In Oakland Unified for the 2024-2025 school year, the district’s approved budget includes revenues totaling $767 million. Of that, $52.2 million comes from D.C. The federal money breaks down to about $10 million for special education, $20 million for high-poverty schools, $5 million for career and technical education, and $1.5 million for English learners. Twelve million dollars are allocated from the Every Student Succeeds Act, legislation signed into law by President Barack Obama to reauthorize the George W. Bush-era No Child Left Behind Act that increased federal funding to schools.

Nearly 80% of OUSD students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, an indicator of poverty level. Seventy-one OUSD schools, educating more than 30,000 of the district’s 34,000 students, receive Title 1 funds, which range from $2,160 at the district’s home and hospital program that provides schooling to students who are too sick to come to school, to $476,640 at Oakland High, which in the 2024-2025 school year received the highest amount of any school.

The money pays for stipends for teachers who support newcomer students, salaries for staff who coach educators, intervention support for students struggling with math or reading, college and career counselors for middle school students, and supplies and technology.

Ten million dollars of federal funding goes to special education in OUSD, paying for therapists, paraeducators and aides, and other support for students with disabilities.

Huddleston added that the federal Department of Education also plays an accountability role when it comes to testing and student achievement. The National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), or the “Nation’s report card” is administered by the Department of Education and offers insight into how students are faring across the country. In the wake of the COVID pandemic, measures like these are crucial, Huddleston said.

“We’ve all heard the test score data come out within recent years and we know our students are struggling,” she said. “If the Department of Education goes away, we lose our ability to understand what’s happening on the ground.”

And the Department of Education investigates allegations of civil rights violations by school districts.The department’s Office for Civil Rights is currently investigating Oakland Unified for an unauthorized teach-in about Palestine, which a complaint alleges amounted to harassment and discrimination against Jewish students.

(https://oaklandside.org/2024/11/27/oakland-federal-funding-trump/

We believe in the power of nonprofit news to transform communities and strengthen democracy.The Oaklandside is committed to telling stories about what’s beautiful in Oakland as well as the city’s systemic problems, their root causes and possible solutions.

Canada is already examining tariffs on certain US items following Trump's tariff threat

ROB GILLIES Updated Wed, November 27, 2024

TORONTO (AP) — Canada is already examining possible retaliatory tariffs on certain items from the United States should President-elect Donald Trump follow through on his threat to impose sweeping tariffs on Canadian products, a senior official said Wednesday.

Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on products from Canada and Mexicoif the countries don't stop what he called the flow of drugs and migrants across southern and northern borders. He said he would impose a 25% tax on all products entering the U.S. from Canada and Mexico as one of his first executive orders.

But Trump posted Wednesday evening on Truth Social that he had a “wonderful conversation" with new Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and she “agreed to stop Migration through Mexico.”

“Mexico will stop people from going to our Southern Border, effective immediately. THIS WILL GO A LONG WAY TOWARD STOPPING THE ILLEGAL INVASION OF THE USA. Thank you!!!” Trump posted.

It was unclear what impact the conversation will have on Trump’s plan to impose tariffs.

In Canada, a government official said Canada is preparing for every eventuality and has started thinking about what items to target with tariffs in retaliation.The official stressed no decision has been made. The person spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak publicly.

When Trump imposed higher tariffs during his first term in office, other countries responded with retaliatory tariffs of their own. ==Canada, for instance, announced billions of new duties in 2018 against the U.S. in a tit-for-tat response to new taxes on Canadian steel and aluminum=•.

Many of the U.S. products were chosen for their political rather than economic impact. For example, Canada imports $3 million worth of yogurt from the U.S. annually and most comes from one plant in Wisconsin, home state of then-House Speaker Paul Ryan. That product was hit with a 10% duty.

Another product on the list was whiskey, which comes from Tennessee and Kentucky, the latter of which is the home state of then-Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell.

Trump made the threat Monday while railing against an influx of illegal migrants, even though the numbers at Canadian border pale in comparison to the southern border.

The U.S. Border Patrol made 56,530 arrests at the Mexican border in October alone — and 23,721 arrests at the Canadian one between October 2023 and September 2024.

Canadian officials say lumping Canada in with Mexico is unfair but say they are ready to make new investments in border security and work with the Trump administration to lower the numbers from Canada. The Canadians are also worried about a influx north of migrants if Trump follows through with his plan for mass deportations.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/canada-already-examining-tariffs-certain-205118879.html

Trudeau needs to go

Buy American to avoid Trump trade war, says Christine Lagarde

Nov. 27, 2024.1/2

ECB chief takes aim at claim that tariffs will ‘make America great again’ — but calls for negotiation, not retaliation.

Christine Lagarde has urged Europe’s political leaders to co-operate with Donald Trump over tariffs and buy more products made in the US,warning that an acrimonious trade war risks wiping out global economic growth.

The European Central Bank chief said in her first interview since Trump won his second presidential term that the EU needed “not to retaliate, but to negotiate” with a president-elect who has threatened a blanket tariff of up to 20 per cent on all non-Chinese US imports.

Lagarde also cautioned that a “trade war at large” was “in nobody’s interest” and would lead to “a global reduction of GDP”. Taking aim at Trump’s claims that he could “make America great again”, the ECB chief said: “How do you make America great again if global demand is falling?”

Trump’s victory has raised concerns among national governments and officials in Brussels, who fear tariffs would wipe out the EU’s large trade surplus with the US and spur the region’s manufacturers to shift production there.

Lagarde said that Europe should deal with a second Trump term with a “cheque-book strategy” in which it offered “to buy certain things from the United States=”, such as liquefied natural gas and defence equipment. “This is a better scenario than a pure retaliation strategy==, which can lead to a tit-for-tat process where no one is really a winner,” the ECB president said.

The European Commission, which runs trade policy for the EU’s 27 member states, is still considering how it would respond.

Increasing purchases of US exports, including agricultural products, as well as LNG and weapons, are among the options under consideration, according to officials involved in the preparations.

The EU is also preparing to allow US companies to participate in initiatives to support joint military procurement with EU taxpayer money, and to align more closely with the White House on its trade and geopolitical policies towards China.

Lagarde has been unusually outspoken for a central banker in voicingher opinion on the US president-elect, saying earlier this year that a second Trump term was “clearly a threat” for Europe. She told the Financial Times this week that the remark was “prescient”.

“Just look at the debates that we are having in many countries in Europe,” she said.

Her counterpart at the Federal Reserve, Jay Powell, has carefully avoided opining on Trump, despite him tweeting during his first term that the US central bank chair was possibly a “bigger enemy” to the American economy than China.

Lagarde said her thinking on how to handle a second Trump term had “changed a bit” over the course of 2024,saying it was also Europe’s responsibility to use the US election result to spur much-needed changes to an economy that was struggling to keep up with its rivals.

“It is up to us now — the Europeans — to transform that threat attitude of ours into a challenge that we have to respond to,”the ECB president said. While she disputed claims that Europe was embroiled in a crisis, the current situation was “a big awakening”.

Lagarde agreed with her predecessor Mario Draghi’s diagnosis that the EU needed to take drastic action to regain its economic competitiveness, after struggling to keep up with the US over recent decades.

“Europe is lagging behind. But I wouldn’t say that Europe cannot catch up,” she said.

Economists believe Trump’s threat to impose significant tariffs on Chinese exports to the US could lead Beijing’s manufacturers to flood European markets with their products, presenting a further threat to domestic competitiveness.

The dumping of cheap products would exacerbate tensions between the EU and China, one of its main trade partners, and place further pressure on a region beset by economic stagnation since the Covid-19 pandemic struck.

https://archive.is/k8a7n

>>22071646

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The ECB president said policymakers needed to monitor such a “rerouting scenario” for Chinese goods carefully.

During his campaign, the president-elect threatened to impose a 60 per cent tariff on all Chinese imports.

On Monday evening, Trump said he would impose a 10 per cent levy on Beijing from his first day in office, in retaliation for China doing too little to crack down on the manufacturing of substances used to produce fentanyl.

Lagarde talked to the FT earlier on Monday, ahead of Trump’s remarks.

She called on Europe to cut through Trump’s campaign rhetoric and to focus on the details of his proposals so far, arguing it was “interesting” that he had suggested introducing tariffs of between 10 and 20 per cent on non-Chinese imports.

“The fact that you put out a range means that you are open to discussion,” she said, adding that this created the opportunity to “sit at the table and see how we can work together”.

While Lagarde said it was too early to assess the implications of US tariffs on inflation in the Eurozone, overall, she said that “if anything”, the effect was “maybe . . . a little net inflationary in the short term”, pointing to a likely reduction in economic activity and swings in foreign exchange rates. “But you could argue both ways,” she added. “It depends what the tariffs are, what they are applied on and over what period of time.”

For Europe, the incoming Trump administration’s stance on trade and transatlantic co-operation were an “accelerator of a reset that we need”,Lagarde said.

She singled out the long-standing idea to create a single market for capital in Europe — the so-called Capital Markets Union — and urged the EU to “move quickly” with it. The idea was first proposed by the Juncker Commission in 2014, but so far has been held up by domestic opposition in many of the EU27 member states. “I have not seen such a level of understanding and excitement as we have now,” said Lagarde.

She called for capital markets supervision to move from the EU’s 27 national authorities to the European Securities and Markets Authority. “We should have one single supervisor” that “operates like the Securities and Exchange Commission”, Lagarde said, referring to the US’s capital markets watchdog.

Asked about the view that Europe’s economy was so outdated and ossified that the continent was turning into a “museum”, Lagarde quipped that “it’s a pretty attractive museum if you ask me”.

She pointed to a “huge amount of innovation” across the continent, naming the Dutch farming sector as an example: “Did you know that the Netherlands is the second-largest farming product exporter in the world? Look at the size of the country!”

Confronted with a common criticism that Dutch tomatoes are lacking in taste, she responded: “But you eat them.”

https://archive.is/k8a7n

Why is she sounding reasonable?

Schweikart And Bannon Discuss President Lincoln Proclamation Establishing The First ThanksgivingThis guy is so knowledgeable, its exciting to listen to the history

11:06

https://rumble.com/embed/v5rrgcn/?pub=4

He says give your family and friends a break here at the Thanksgiving feast

WATCH: Steve Bannon Plays Clip From Movie 'The New World'

7:50

https://rumble.com/embed/v5rrj1b/?pub=4

Steve Bannon Reflects On The WarRoom Posse's Impact On American History

14:00

https://rumble.com/embed/v5rri4e/?pub=4

>>22072066

I think he suffers everyday, the more lies he tells, the more guilt he feels, and the closer to hell he gets

>>22072059

Wow, I was just thinking this am, Russia is the only country that doesn't constantly condemn Trump. They go through the same thing that they are going through

>>22072046

Thats why Poso and others collect their threads long before they delete them