Multicultural Business Coalition sues New York City mayor, alleging plan for city-run stores will harm smaller grocers

A New York City business group sued mayor Zohran Mamdani on Monday over his plan to create five municipally owned grocery stores.

The Multicultural Business Coalition, which says it represents hundreds of small supermarkets, filed two lawsuits in New York county supreme court on Monday, arguing that the plan violates the civil rights of smaller, immigrant- and minority-owned businesses. The group argues that smaller stores would be unable to match the discounts offered by the city grocery stores and “therefore, will be put out of business,” according to the lawsuits.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s co-opting of conservative language to discuss a movement against state-sanctioned killings of Black people is damning

August has brought us a referendum on “Woke 1” – a term that reductively brands 2020’s social justice movement – as prominent liberal voices reflect on that time period with disappointing hindsight. During a recent appearance on ABC’s This Week, when asked about 2020-era demands to abolish prisons and police, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the US congresswoman from New York, abandoned her previous support of the “defund the police” movement, and instead joked: “Woke 1 was crazyyyyy.”

Ocasio-Cortez, a democratic socialist, implied that the still-resounding calls for municipalities to reduce police budgets and to divert aid to poor communities were worth advocating for during the 2020 uprising, but are now “crazyyyyy”. In 2020, she noted that “a lot of people cannot fathom what an abolitionist America looks like. Tell them it looks like a suburb. Affluent white communities already live in a world where they choose to fund youth, health, housing more than they fund police.” But she has since backtracked on that idea.