#mark levine

by Corey Walker

New York City’s top financial official defended the city’s ongoing investment in Israel bonds as the administration of Mayor Zohran Mamdani faced growing criticism over its refusal to adopt a formal definition of antisemitism and continued hostile posture toward the Jewish state, paving the way for a showdown over how New York should address hate crimes and foreign investment policy.

Comptroller Mark Levine said on Wednesday that bonds issued by the Israeli government remained a safe, long-standing investment for city pension funds, insisting that financial decisions must be separated from political pressure. Levine pointed to the bonds’ decades-long record of repayment and argued his office’s responsibility was to maximize returns for retirees, not respond to shifting political campaigns.

“This is not political. It shouldn’t be political,” said Levine, a Democrat. “Israel bonds have never missed a payment in 70 years, ever, not once.”

The comptroller noted that the city has investments in other foreign countries but only faces protests for its association with Israel.

Own a Suppressor in Virginia? You Could Be Looking at a Felony

If  you own a legally obtained suppressor in Virginia, a new bill will make it a felony to possess. HB 961, filed by Democrat Mark Levine, makes it a felony to possess a suppressor if it has not been surrendered or removed from the state. And that’s only part of Levine’s bill.

Breitbart noted:

Under Levine’s bill, H.B.961, Virginians who have undergone the legal process to acquire a suppressor…

A few weeks later, I showed up to the last class. It was a beautiful spring day. Levine was all smiles. “I’m feeling great,” he told the group. “I just picked up my paycheck.” I brought in a new poem called “My Milieu,” about being on vacation with my parents when I was fifteen. It was, I think, a hard thing for me to have written, let alone to have brought to class: a poem about being embarrassed by my parents; about being attached to them; about belonging to a family that was gone.

(...)

Levine responded, “What it’s about is how difficult it is to live, to live as a young person and then to live as an old person.”

A recent example is the controversy surrounding a school desegregation plan in the city of Columbia, Maryland – a town established in the 1960s as an integrated community symbolising the “Next America”. The opposition to the plan reveals how those who enjoy privilege will behave in ways they would otherwise consider racist when they are called upon to potentially sacrifice some of that privilege to benefit long-disadvantaged African American and Hispanic communities.

This should not surprise us. While whiteness and its avatar, “Western civilisation”, have for centuries declared themselves to be the epitome of Enlightenment and freedom, historians have demonstrated not only the historicity of whiteness and its contingency, but that whiteness emerged directly and almost exclusively through its connection to imperialism/colonialism, slavery, genocide and modern-day racism.

We need only think of all those smiling white faces in photos of lynchings across the American south – what WEB Du Bois described as “the writing of human hatred, a deep and passionate hatred … on the pale, white faces” – to understand how the ontological pleasure gained from participating in the humiliation and extermination of black people is the most enduring identifying marker of whiteness.