Name of Council Candidate: Jerry Kann Name and Title of Person Completing Questionnaire: Jerry Kann, Candidate Campaign

Website: kannforcouncil2013.wordpress.com

2013 CITY COUNCIL HUMAN RIGHTS QUESTIONNAIRE

1. Many in the United States think of international affairs when they think of human rights. Our work emphasizes the applicability of the human rights framework here in the United States. Please share your thoughts on the domestic applicability of human rights, and discuss why human rights are important to you in the context of New York City and the City Council. There are two primary areas of concern in terms of human rights here in New York City: Police brutality and homelessness. 1. In the recent civil trial challenging the constitutionality of the New York Police Departments stop-and-frisk policy, State Senator Eric Adams testified that Commissioner Kelly was indeed focusing on predominantly African-American and Latino neighborhoods with a view to intimidating young men in those parts of the city. I found Adams testimony compelling evidence that the Mayor and the Commissioner have perpetrated an enormous human rights violation with their massive, systematic use of stop-and-frisk. No personno human beingshould be subject to being stopped and searched many times over, when in nine cases out of ten that person has done nothing wrong. And for practical purposes, stop-and-frisk is not just discriminatory but also racist. City Council has taken one step in the right direction by voting (by a veto-proof margin) to mandate an Inspector General to oversee the NYPD, but they need to fully repeal the unlimited, demonstrably unconstitutional stop-and-frisk policy. 2. Homelessness in New York City could be largely eliminated by a program in which the homeless themselves could be employed in building low-income housing. 2. How have you used current or previous professional positions to advance human rights? I have never held any exalted position in any profession, but Ive had a couple of experiences that may address your question. As a temp/freelancer at a well-known advertising agency, I was once given an in-house brochure to proofread. The copy described a process whereby a team of account executives evaluated a marketing idea. Strangely, they used the term gang bang to describe this process. Though I was at the very bottom of the organizational chart, one of the graphic artists and I quietly but persistently wrote back to the team several times to suggest that the term was out-ofline even for an in-house document, especially since some employeesboth female and malemight feel too intimidated to complain about the use of the term. They eventually dropped the term from their final draft.

As an assistant at a reputable child welfare agency, I once referred a teenage boy (whom I presumed was gay) to a friend of mine who was then a very active LGBT organizer. I was happy to learn later, from one of my supervisors, that my action was OK, even though it might not have occurred to my bosses to take this approach with the boy. 3. What will your top 3 legislative priorities be in your first term as Council Member? 1. At least doubling the number of representatives for tenants on the Rent Guidelines Board 2. Introducing bills to reform the Campaign Finance Board (CFB) by subjecting its Final Determinations to judicial and community reviewand the Conflicts of Interest Board (COIB)by making public all complaints determined to have merit and granting an appeals process to complainants 3. Abolishing stop-and-frisk by an act of Council (and more along the lines of the complete set of all four Intros of the original Community Safety Act, not just the two that recently passed the Council) 4. What will your top 3 budget priorities be in your first term as Council Member? 1. Raising the citys Personal Income Tax (PIT) by 1% for residents who earn above $500,000 per annum 2. Passing a half-penny-per-transaction sales tax on all sales of securities on the NYSE/Euronext exchange. 3. Passing a participatory budgeting mandate for all City Council districts 5. Do you plan to use participatory budgeting to allocate your discretionary funds? Why or why not? See Item 4/3, immediately above. Yes, of course! Whats more, I have a white paper I wrote for my 2005 campaign calling for and detailing a system of Community Councils to replace the Community Boards. Under my proposed plan, the Community Councils districts would be co-terminous with the City Council districts, its members would be elected rather than appointed, and each districts City Council member would be required to report to the Community Council at least ten times a year. Such a structure would naturally include Participatory Budgeting. 6. Please provide examples of recent legislation in Council that you believe promotes human rights. Intros 1080 and 1079, passed recently by the Council, are about the only examples that come to mind. I first reviewed my memory of news accounts I might have come across concerning the Council over the last year or two, and then I took a look at the record of disposition of 2013 legislation on the Council website: see http://legistar.council.nyc.gov/Legislation.aspx. 7. Legislation is only one of many ways in which Council Members can work to advance human rights. What ways other than through legislation will you advance the human rights of New Yorkers as a City Council Member? I think we need to get back to the attitude adopted by New York Governors Al Smith and Franklin Roosevelt (and perhaps even more importantly, the attitude of their gadfly advisor Frances Perkins) back in the 1920s and early 1930s concerning the whole idea of competition. The New York Power Authority, though not such a great benefit to the people of the state nowadays, was in 1931 meant to provide some competition to the private electric power companies of the day, those that had been gouging the hell out of rate-payers even as the US (and world) economy was falling to pieces.

The Bloomberg legacy is a knee-jerk approval of privatization and a dreamy faith in the magic of the marketplace, in which very rich people get even richer and a small professional/ technocratic class of residents does very well, but in which most people have been losing ground steadily since the beginning of this minor depression in 2007-08. We should now be discussing and considering, in wide-open and informal settings, a city authority that will build affordable housing not for rich people who dont need it but for poor people who do. 8. Some advocates contend that the position of the Council Speaker has too much power over the progression of legislation. Please use this space to respond to that critique. Council members must not be assigned to committees by the Speaker, but should (must) apply to assignment on committees they want to serve on, agreeing on some objective measure for ranking a members fitness to serve on a particular committee. Though arriving at such criteria would be very difficult at first, it would ultimately be much more fair, democratic, and probably efficacious from a purely practical standpoint. Chairs of those committees should (must) be elected by the other committee members. Council members must draft their own proposed legislation, in consultation with the Law Dept. and with advice from (but no veto for) the Speaker. Decisions about hearings for new legislation should be made by majority vote of the full Council.

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