Grocery store socialism already failing in Chicago
Source: Washington Examiner · Bias: Center Right
Summary
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani promised Monday that his city-owned grocery stores would offer high-quality fresh produce and other basic groceries at prices guaranteed to be 30% lower than those at surrounding privately owned stores. But before New Yorkers start counting their potential savings, they might want to look at Chicago, where a similar […]
Grocery store socialism already failing in Chicago
Center Right
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani promised Monday that his city-owned grocery stores would offer high-quality fresh produce and other basic groceries at prices guaranteed to be 30% lower than those at surrounding privately owned stores. But before New Yorkers start counting their potential savings, they might want to look at Chicago, where a similar […]
President Donald Trump’s social media network’s plan to sell faster access to Truth Social posts hands Democrats another high-profile target as they prep congressional investigations into the Trump administration in case they win in the November midterm elections. Trump Media & Technology Group, which runs the Truth Social platform, recently announced the plan. Trump’s posts […]
The first round of August Social Security payments for retirees, now capped at $5,181, will be issued in 14 days. When will payments arrive? Retirees born on or before the 10th of a month will receive this payment on Wednesday, Aug. 12. The second round will go out on Aug. 19 to those born between […]
Center-left Democratic officials are coalescing around the opponents of Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong and Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in primaries that will take place over the next month. That’s in part because of ideology—many centrists simply don’t agree with the progressive policy stands of Hong and El-Sayed. But some centrists say that they are backing Hong and El=Sayed’s opponents because progressive candidates like those two don’t often win in swing states. And many of Hong and El-Sayed’s supporters are also essentially buying into that historical analysis. They are deeply invested in Hong and/or El-Sayed winning the general election, suggesting those victories would be unique evidence of progressive electoral strength in swing states and would show that someone like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could be elected president. Both sides’ perspectives are ahistorical, too caught up in the current Mamdani-Sanders-AOC moment. Numerous progressives have won in swing states and districts in the past. Neither El-Sayed nor Hong would be the first progressive candidate to win in the Midwest. Ocasio-Cortez wouldn’t be the first president with a left-wing background. These primaries are a real fight over which faction controls the Democratic Party today. But they shouldn’t obscure the success of progressive candidates years and even decades before anyone had ever heard of Claire Valdez or Ilhan Omar. What makes this debate complicated is that there are not precise definitions of progressive, leftist, or other such ideological terms. And what constitutes progressive or leftist politics changes over time. Many progressive politicians were not supportive of same-sex marriage in 2002, but virtually all progressive politicians hold that stance today. So for this article, I looked at politicians who were described or self-identified as progressive or very liberal during a given campaign and their results. Let’s go back 20 years. “An unabashed progressive takes aim at a Senate seat in Ohio,” was the tagline of a November 2005 piece in the leftist publication In These Times. The author is Chris Hayes, who went on to greater fame. The unabashed progressive is Sherrod Brown, then serving in the House. Brown is considered a traditional Democrat now. But back then, his opposition to the Iraq War and deep skepticism of NAFTA and other international trade agreements put him firmly on the Democratic left. “If a bedrock economic populist like Brown can win in a red state, it will explode the post-Clinton conventional wisdom that anything resembling ’class warfare’ is a non-starter for the Democrats,” Hayes wrote. Among those who praised Brown in Hayes’s article was Bernie Sanders, then Vermont’s congressman. Brown ended up winning the Ohio Senate race in 2006—against a two-term incumbent—by 12 points. “I ran a very outspokenly progressive campaign, standing up for the middle class, taking on the drug companies and the oil companies … And I think that that campaign shows that you can win in moderately conservative states as progressive Democrats,” Brown told NPR in November 2006. Two years later, a man described by another In These Times writer as an “unflinching progressive” won Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and other states across the Midwest. Again, today we don’t think of Barack Obama as being particularly leftist. But in 2008, being a strong opponent of the Iraq War, a critic of the death penalty, and a skeptic of the Israeli government, all positions he held in his rise in Illinois politics, were very much on the party’s left. Obama’s 2007 voting record was the most liberal of any senator, according to National Journal. And it’s not just those two. In 2012, Tammy Baldwin, who had been a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, was elected to the Senate from Wisconsin. Andy Kim won reelection in 2022 in a competitive district in New Jersey even though his opponent attacked him for being a member of the Progressive Caucus. Ruben Gallego, elected to the Senate in 2024 from Arizona, was a member of the Medicare-for-All and Progressive caucuses during his House days. Adam Bonica, a political scientist at Stanford University, found that from 2016 to 2024 there were 27 successful U.S. House campaigns in swing districts by candidates whose ideology was left of the average Democratic politician. Georgia’s Raphael Warnock and Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman won Senate races in swing states even though voters perceived them as fairly progressive, says Bonica, citing the Cooperative Election Study, in which voters themselves rank candidates on a seven-point ideological scale. (Sadly, Fetterman has changed his stripes since then.)Progressive candidates at times obviously lose, including Brown in his 2024 reelection bid. And it’s true that there are far more centrists and more moderates than progressives representing swing districts and states. But that’s in part a screening effect.
During his campaign, Zohran Mamdani promised to bring down food costs.
The post Mamdani Government Food Stores: Food Isn’t Cheaper, Someone Else Just Pays for It appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
An immigrant-led business group is reportedly preparing to sue New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani over complaints stemming from his taxpayer-funded grocery stores, one of his landmark policies. The Multicultural Business Coalition — a nonprofit group formed earlier this year in response to the state-funded grocery stores, representing Asian, African, Caribbean, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, and […]
A 30% grocery markdown?That is the pricing framework that will guide the city’s five government-owned grocery stores, democratic socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced during a press conference Monday.'Our five city-run grocery stores will set prices for this core set of goods at 30% below typical retail prices.'Standing in front of shelves stocked with produce in a Brooklyn warehouse, Mamdani addressed the sharp rise in grocery prices over the past several years, citing a 30% increase since 2019.To offset that increase, the mayor announced “a collection of essential staples that will be predictably 30% cheaper at all five of our city-run grocery stores.”The discount will apply to items including fresh produce, meat, seafood, and “20 other essential items like cheese, milk, and bread,” Mamdani said, adding that prices will be set once per month to eliminate week-to-week fluctuations.“Once a month, our five city-run grocery stores will set prices for this core set of goods at 30% below typical retail prices. No exceptions.”The mayor has repeatedly pledged — both on the campaign trail and since taking office — to open one of these stores in each of the city’s five boroughs. The first location is expected to open in the Bronx by the end of 2027, with the remaining four stores slated to be operational by the end of his four-year term, including one in East Harlem.Mamdani also said the city-run grocery stores would not sell cigarettes, alcohol, lottery tickets, or hot food, which are typically among the most profitable products for bodega and convenience store owners. The move is intended to address concerns that the mayor’s initiative could undercut privately owned stores in the surrounding areas.RELATED: Mamdani plan includes 5 city-run grocery markets — with massive price tag “We know that a lot of what drives revenue for these bodegas, grocery stores, those are things that make it possible for them to continue to operate. Those are not things we have any interest in competing for,” Mamdani said.Former Mayor Eric Adams (D) has been a vocal critic of the initiative, arguing that Mamdani's plan would “devastate the local bodegas and local stores and the local supermarkets where they employ people," calling it “not the right thing to do.”Grocery executive John Catsimatidis, the owner of Gristedes and D’Agostino Supermarkets, has also bashed the proposal. In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Catsimatidis predicted the mayor's program “would collapse our food supply, kill private industry, and drag us down a path toward the bread lines of the old Soviet Union."Under the current proposal, the city would own the property and cover the costs of construction, rent, and property taxes. A private operator would partner with the city to manage the stores' day-to-day operations, including sourcing products, stocking shelves, and maintaining customer service.Mamdani is now seeking private operators to run the stores, inviting applicants with grocery management experience to take part in the city’s government-owned retail experiment.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
