Les Inrockuptibles: La fusillade de Newtown relance le débat sur le port d'armes aux Etats-Unis

The Common Good’s founder and CEO, Patricia Duff, has long been a respected voice on American democracy and politics. She was recently featured in the French publication Les Inrockuptibles to discuss how The Common Good can provide a solution to bridge the growing divisions in the US:

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The solution could come from non-partisan organizations like 'The Common Good' whose objective is to provoke a constructive debate between Republicans and Democrats. For Patricia Duff, the President (of The Common Good):

"These killings are the result of the availability of firearms, especially automatic and semi-automatic weapons and their ammunition. We will all, individually and through associations, seek to reopen the reasoned debate on the subject of "gun control". This is a question that has been ignored for too long and needs to be vigorously reconsidered. And the sooner the better " […]

- Laurent David Samama [Translated by Miffy Cheng-Thomas]

Read the full article HERE.

NYC Informer: Declaring for Manhattan BP, Menin Announces 216 Endorsements

Former Community Board 1 Chair Julie Menin is a first-time candidate, but she certainly isn’t running like one.

Before even announcing her candidacy for Manhattan Borough President she maxed out on fundraising, and yesterday at City Hall when she did formally declare her intention to succeed Scott Stringer, who is running for comptroller instead of reelection, Menin simultaneously unveiled a list of no less than 216 endorsements.

The endorsements, which were broken down geographically into “East Side,” “West Side,” “Uptown” and “Lower Manhattan,” include a wide array of community activists, district leaders, state committee members, community board chairs, and prominent New Yorkers, including Tim & Nina Zagat, Geraldine Laybourne, the founder and former chair of Oxygen Media and Patricia Duff, founder and CEO of The Common Good.

Though it was not stated in the release, the list was also a tacit jab at Menin’s probable opponents as it included a host of neighborhood leaders from districts represented by Councilmembers Jessica Lappin, Robert Jackson and Gale Brewer, all of whom are also vying for the borough’s top job.

- NYC Informer staff, READ MORE

Fortune: Alan Simpson paints dire market outlook

In a speech in New York City Monday to a non-partisan, politically-attuned group called The Common Good, Simpson said the stalemate that appears to be playing out in the news may be what is really going on in Washington with Congress, even behind the scenes. “I don’t really feel they are playing games now. I think they are totally confused,” Simpson said. “But they know the President has one basic thing on his mind: raising taxes on the rich and let me tell you folks: That’s going to happen.” Both Simpson and Erskine Bowles, the Democrat from the Clinton administration who co-chaired the commission that put out a 64-page plan for reform entitled “The Moment of Truth,” have been under non-stop attack since their report was released two years ago. Simpson says Bowles “used to think we had a chance not to go off the cliff, but now he thinks it is a one-third chance. I think we will go off the cliff and the markets will call the shots and the chaos will be destructive.”

- Alan Dodds Frank [TCG Member] for Fortune, READ MORE

New Yorker: Naked Truths

In the non-fairy-tale world we actually live in, nobody pays much attention if some random urchin on a street corner starts shouting that a feared and lofty potentate isn’t wearing any clothes. But if the shouters are a pair of prestigious guardians of public rectitude and upholders of the ancient traditions of civic morality, then word that the emperor in question is not just buck naked but scrofulous and syphilitic just might begin to trickle down to the lower orders.

Such a duo of über-respectables are Thomas E. Mann, a luminary of the ever so slightly left-of-center Brookings Institution, and Norman J. Ornstein, an ornament of the somewhat more firmly right-of-center American Enterprise Institute, both of whom used to communicate in tones of calm, non-inflammatory reassurance[…]

At a lunch sponsored by The Common Good, Patricia Duff’s floating political salon, Ornstein said that the nonpartisan reputations which he and Mann have earned over their long careers represent a store of capital, and that the Republican Party’s comprehensive lurch to the extreme right had persuaded them that “now is the time to spend that capital.” Both parties have become more ideologically uniform—more “parliamentary.”

- Hendrik Hertzberg for The New Yorker, READ MORE