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By Ray Lesniak

So much is written and heard about the inability of progressives and conservatives to come together and address the issues that divide our society. Yet New Jersey is on the verge of bridging that divide - on criminal justice reform.

Legislation I have championed for five years, Earn Your Way Out, is the most significant criminal justice reform proposal in America and has support from progressives and conservatives. It has passed the state Senate and Assembly and just needs Senate concurrence in Assembly amendments and Gov. Phil Murphys signature to become law.

Earn Your Way Out will give inmates an opportunity to become better persons when they leave prison than when they entered - by beginning a reentry program upon entry into prison that will give them a day off their sentence for every six days an inmate participates in education, job training, therapy and community service programs.

Its a program that will save millions of tax dollars and, at the same time, better prepare inmates for a successful law-abiding reentry into society. America has 5% of the worlds population and 25% of the worlds prison population and three of 10 released from prison return to prison in three years. These numbers not only reflect upon the prisoner, but directly affect the prisoners family and community, in addition to costing taxpayers over $60,000 a year to incarcerate and individual.

Earn Your Way Out also includes presumptive parole, which grants parole on presumptive parole dates to inmates who have not had serious offenses while in prison. Violent prisoners with No Early Release Date Sentences will still be held to their original sentences and be subject to review by the Parole Board before being eligible for release from prison.

With Presumptive Parole, New Jerseys bloated Parole Board with 13 full-time members who benefit from political patronage appointments -- and work just three-to-five hours many days for salaries of $116,000 to $123,000 a year, plus cars, four weeks vacation and full health and pension benefits --- will have its workload reduced by 75%, hopefully persuading the Legislature and governor to likewise reduce its size and use the tax dollars more effectively by hiring full-time professional parole officers to supervise ex-offenders and help them lead law abiding lives.

Americans for Prosperity, a conservative political advocacy group in the United States funded by David Koch and Charles Koch agree. As the Koch brothers primary political advocacy group, it is one of the most influential American conservative organizations. At a recent Assembly Appropriations Committee meeting, Tyler Koteskey, criminal justice policy analyst at Americans for Prosperity, said, Earn Your Way Out would give inmates with a track record of good behavior and a desire for rehabilitation additional opportunities to accrue compliance credits against their sentence and a pathway to a streamlined administrative parole release.

While New Jerseyans who commit crimes should be held accountable, they dont benefit from policies that incarcerate those ready to re enter their communities longer than is necessary. And at per-inmate incarceration costs of over $60,000 per year, neither do New Jersey taxpayers. By allowing administrative parole for lower level, well-behaved offenders who have sought out rehabilitative programming, Earn Your Way Out will give more New Jerseyans in the correctional system the opportunity to turn their lives around, contribute to their communities, and reunite with their families.

Earn Your Way Out also tasks the state Department of Corrections with creating a Division of Reentry Services, which will help inmates prepare for release and connect them with resources tailored to a variety of potential individual needs, such as mental health, substance abuse, employment, or education. Connecting inmates with these individualized services will go a long way in improving New Jerseys recidivism rate and continuing to reduce taxpayer burdens. By ensuring New Jersey sentencing is more proportional to offenders individual circumstances, we can avoid these drawbacks and make our state a more just place."

Koteskey said, "I applaud Earn Your Way Outs effort to provide earlier second chances. Its an important step forward for New Jersey that stands to benefit both reentering citizens and taxpayers alike.

Conservative Americans For Prosperity and New Jerseys progressive sponsors of Earn Your Way Out, Senator Sandra Cunningham and Assemblywoman Savada Sumpter, have united progressives and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, a rare occurrence these days. Earn Your Way Out has brought both political philosophies together. It should occur more frequently.

Raymond (Ray) Lesniak served in the State Senate from 1983 to 2018 and in the General Assembly from 1978 to 1983.

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Lesniak: Both conservatives and progressives agree on this criminal justice reform - NJ.com

DECEMBER 1, 2019

WHEN I WAS a seventh grader in Queens, New York, an entire unit of social studies class was devoted to Israel. I remember reverently tracing the map of the young Jewish state. Its creation story was inspiring: the Jewish nation rose like a phoenix from the ashes of genocide. I had recently learned from my parents that these ashes included their families, killed in Treblinka and Auschwitz.

The year was 1960. I was 13, a transplant to America from the Displaced Persons camp in Germany in which I was born and that served as home for my first four years. Israel was the antidote to my familys history of despair. Zionists were the visionaries and pioneers who gave birth to the Land of Milk and Honey and made the desert bloom noble warriors who fought and won the battle for Israel against its surrounding enemies.

Sixty years later, this narrative has been largely erased and replaced. Zionism has become a dirty word synonymous with racism, apartheid, and oppression; the white Europeans who established an outpost of Western colonialism in a land belonging exclusively to dark-skinned Arabs. Jewish settlers in Palestine have been cast as imperialists in a land to which they have no moral claim.

How did this story change so drastically? In a word: occupation. Six million dead in the Holocaust made Jews the worlds greatest victims, deserving of their own state as an antidote to a history of genocidal persecution. But as the memory of the Holocaust faded, and especially after the 1967 War of self-defense resulting in the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, this story flipped. The victims became the victors. Palestinians languishing in refugee camps drew the worlds sympathies.

The occupation has been a disaster for Palestinians. The relentless expansion of Jewish settlements on the West Bank, balkanization of Palestinian land, denial of water rights, and daily indignities suffered by Palestinians have made their struggle a legitimate cause for justice-seeking progressives. Over the years, Israel has continued to expand its settlements with an eye toward geographical growth and border security. Like the Arab and Muslim nations that could not tolerate a Jewish state in their midst in 1948, Israels current leadership can no longer tolerate the idea of a truly independent Palestinian state.

At the same time, the occupation, for many progressives today, refers not to 1967 but to 1948. The demonization of Israel has gathered steam over the years and is the backbone of the PC brand of antisemitic anti-Zionism that flourishes today, in which the ancient animosity toward Jews as a race has been transposed to Israel as a nation.

Hence, an important question for leftists. In the context of Israeli military domination and West Bank expansionism, can a legitimate case be made for a progressive Zionism?

For anyone who believes that Jewish nationalism is as defensible as any other nationalism, the answer is yes, but a complicated yes. Defending Zionism without condemning the occupation and supporting a Palestinian state is untenable. But so too is supporting the Palestinian struggle for statehood without condemning the antisemitic elements of Nazi-influenced Arab nationalism and its existential threat to Israel.

Extremists on both sides have a lot in common. Just as extremist Israel supporters deny the validity of any criticism of Israel and dub it antisemitic, so extremist Palestinian supporters deny the validity of any support for Israel and call it racist. In the either/or framework of these partisans, there is no room for a viewpoint that is sympathetic to both Jews and Arabs. One must choose sides in a zero-sum game.

Whats been lost in all the heat on this subject is the simple truth that Zionism is a nationalist movement for Jewish liberation crossing a wide swath of other ideologies. Some of the first pioneers were socialists, for whom the dream of a Jewish state was synonymous with an end to all forms of economic and racial exploitation and oppression. Some were Jewish fundamentalists who believed that Eretz Yisrael had been promised to the ancient Israelites by God. Most were adamantly secular, insisting that Jews must reject their traditional Old Country passivity, arm themselves in their own country, and never again allow themselves to be rounded up for mass murder.

All agreed that if Jews had a nation of their own, where they werent subject to the laws and traditions of entrenched European antisemitism, they would be safe to live their lives as Jews. The Zionist aim was the ingathering of threatened diaspora Jews to the land in which they had a continuous presence from antiquity, a return to a cherished homeland.

It is this fundamental Zionist idea that many progressives have discredited and that should now be defended with the same passion as it was in 1948.

Given the alarming rise of antisemitism on the right, the left, and in Muslim immigrant communities in the United States and Europe, the defense of the original Zionist vision of Israel as a safe haven for the worlds Jews is more urgent now than at any time since the Holocaust era.

A neutral description of the 100-year clash between Jews and Arabs in Israel/Palestine is that of a war of competing nationalisms. A landless people persecuted, scapegoated, and expelled in their host countries, Jews were propelled to Zionism as a solution to the problem of antisemitism. Palestinians, in their own nationalist struggle against the British Empire, saw Jewish settlers as an alien European force in cahoots with the British, no different from any other white colonialists (a painful historical irony, considering that Jews were not considered white by the Nazis, most Jews in Israel are black Middle Eastern Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, and, far from being indistinguishable from the white British colonizers of the region, European Jews were also fighting the British for their own independent state).

Three wars, two intifadas, several failed attempts at peacemaking brokered by the United States, hundreds of attacks on Israel by Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists and suicide bombers and retaliatory attacks by the Israel military, six decades of the expanding occupation and of an ideological rumble that takes no prisoners none of these events have succeeded in substantially altering this long war.

Israel is the military victor, for now. But Palestinians have been the winner of the ongoing propaganda war. In social justice movements in the United States and Europe, the BDS movement to dismantle Israel and erect a binational state has become an article of faith. Some go so far as to declare that you cant be a real feminist, anti-racist, or progressive of any kind if you dont support the mutation of Israel. For Jews like me, the call to rub out the only Jewish nation in the world resounds with terrible echoes from the past.

Jewish nationalism or Palestinian nationalism which do you legitimize and which do you invalidate? Decades of vitriolic verbal war between partisans on both sides indicate that the answer often hinges on the unstated passions, prejudices, and fears that dictate a compulsive, non-empathic emotional attachment to our side. The more important question, not asked by extremists on either side, is: Why must this be an either/or choice?

Jewish nationalism is as legitimate as Palestinian or any other nationalism no more and no less. When all countries founded on the displacement of ethnic, religious, tribal, or native groups renounce their right to exist, Israel should be among them. Until then, the struggle for human rights must include the support for Jewish national survival alongside a Palestinian state not a binational state that would nullify Israel and invite a war of ethnic cleansing on both sides. Progressives should be able to call themselves Zionist without being shamed, shunned, attacked, and vilified, as they are on American campuses and in progressive circles here and abroad.For a vivid description of the latter, see The New York Times op-ed written by a Jewish student at George Washington University, On the Frontlines of Progressive Anti-Semitism.

While there may be disagreements over strategy, progressive Zionism is a both/and perspective that calls for an end to West Bank expansionism and Palestinian terrorism. To be a progressive Zionist is to have the courage to challenge Israel to clean its house of racist policies toward Palestinians while also calling on anti-Zionists to clean up their antisemitism. It condemns both the racist leadership of Netanyahu as well as the incitements to anti-Israel violence from Hamas. It envisions Jerusalem as a shared capital of two nations.In a recent article in Jewish Currents, How to Fight Antisemitism, presidential candidate Bernie Sanders rejects the idea that there is an inherent contradiction between supporting both Israel and Palestinian independence.

This opens the door to coalitions of progressive Palestinians and Israelis as well as black, Muslim, and Jewish social activists that conjointly resist prejudice in all forms a badly needed antidote to the identity wars dividing the left and the nation. Progressive Zionists know that antisemitism and racism together are the core of white supremacist ideology. These connected bigotries split progressive forces, thereby feeding the rise of fascism here and abroad.

Progressive Zionists have persisted since the creation of Israel. I remember the rancorous struggles of 1970s New Leftists between those of us who demanded two states for two peoples, and those who wanted Israel to disappear. Today organizations like J Street, a progressive alternative to AIPAC in the Jewish community that is both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian, Tikkun magazine and its Network of Spiritual Progressives, and a host of other groups supporting Israeli/Palestinian unity have been continuous voices for sanity, solidarity, and peace.

A hopeful recent development began with the 2017 launch of Zioness, a group of feminist activists that spoke out against antisemitism in the Womens March leadership and other left demonstrations. Its mission is to empower Jews to be activists in the struggle to advance social, racial, economic, and gender justice in the United States without trying to hide their Jewishness or their Zionism. Its slogan sums it all up: Unabashedly Progressive. Unapologetically Zionist. You can indeed be both.

Miriam Greenspan is the author of A New Approach to Women and Therapy and Healing Through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair.

Banner image: Jerusalem Temple Mount view from Mount of Olives by brionv is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

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The Case for Progressive Zionism - lareviewofbooks

Leading Democrats are feeling the heat from black and Latino parents as the party's establishment and 2020 candidates turn their backs on charter schools, the New York Times reported.

"These are folks that should be champions of black children and allies of black educators," said Richard Buery to the Times.

Buery, who is the chief of policy at KIPP, the nation's largest charter network, described the Democrats' shift on the issue as "a reflection more broadly of the lack of respect for black voters in the party."

The concerns from parents and educators come as presidential candidates, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), have pledged to cut school choice options that are popular in minority communities. As the Times noted, former Vice President Joe Biden and Mayor Pete Buttigieg omit the schools in their education platforms and have expressed concerns with them. In 2019, House Democrats voted to cut funding for school choice.

Democrats favored charter schools during Bill Clinton's presidency in the 1990s. Their current about-face on the issue is driven by the growing influence of progressives within the party and candidates seeking endorsements from influential teachers unions who oppose them.

This is pitting white progressive Democrats, who are increasingly skeptical of school choice, against minority voters who support them. Several recent polls demonstrate the sharp racial divisions on the issue among Democrats.

Similarly, a poll from commissioned by Education Next found that among black and Hispanic Democrats' "support for charter schools held steady from 2016 to 2018," while "approval tanked" among white Democrats, dropping from 43 to 27 percent.

Minority voters are speaking out against Democrats' growing opposition to school choice options for low-income families.

Sonia Tyler told the Times, "As a single mom with two jobs and five hustles, I'm just feeling kind of desperate." Adding: "They're brilliant; they're curious. It's not fair. Why shouldn't I have a choice?"

Several weeks ago, a group of concerned black parents heckled Warren at a campaign event in Atlanta. Warren later spoke to one of the protestors who told her they only want the same opportunity the presidential candidate enjoyed of sending her children to private schools. The presidential candidate then falsely claimed her children only attended public schools.

School choice has also become a major issue in local and state races. In2018, progressive Democrat Andrew Gillum ran for governor of Florida opposed to charter programs with heavy backing from teachers unions. An analysis in the Wall Street Journal later concluded the issue may have tipped the race in favor of his rival, Republican Ron DeSantis.

As school choice advocate William Mattox noted, "Believe it or not, Republican Ron DeSantis owes his victory in the Florida gubernatorial election to about 100,000 African-American women who unexpectedly chose him over the black Democratic candidate, Andrew Gillum."

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Minority parents rip Dems as they side with white progressives against charter schools - TheBlaze

Some have more dollars than sense, they say, so even companies that have no revenue, no profit, and a record of falling short, can easily find investors. And in their study titled Who Falls Prey to the Wolf of Wall Street? Leuz et. al. found that it is quite common for investors to lose money by buying into pump and dump schemes.

In contrast to all that, I prefer to spend time on companies like Progressive (NYSE:PGR), which has not only revenues, but also profits. Now, Im not saying that the stock is necessarily undervalued today; but I cant shake an appreciation for the profitability of the business itself. Loss-making companies are always racing against time to reach financial sustainability, but time is often a friend of the profitable company, especially if it is growing.

Check out our latest analysis for Progressive

If you believe that markets are even vaguely efficient, then over the long term youd expect a companys share price to follow its earnings per share (EPS). Its no surprise, then, that I like to invest in companies with EPS growth. I, for one, am blown away by the fact that Progressive has grown EPS by 47% per year, over the last three years. Growth that fast may well be fleeting, but like a lotus blooming from a murky pond, it sparks joy for the wary stock pickers.

Careful consideration of revenue growth and earnings before interest and taxation (EBIT) margins can help inform a view on the sustainability of the recent profit growth. Progressive maintained stable EBIT margins over the last year, all while growing revenue 17% to US$36b. Thats progress.

The chart below shows how the companys bottom and top lines have progressed over time.

Fortunately, weve got access to analyst forecasts of Progressives future profits. You can do your own forecasts without looking, or you can take a peek at what the professionals are predicting.

We would not expect to see insiders owning a large percentage of a US$43b company like Progressive. But we do take comfort from the fact that they are investors in the company. Indeed, they have a glittering mountain of wealth invested in it, currently valued at US$140m. I would find that kind of skin in the game quite encouraging, if I owned shares, since it would ensure that the leaders of the company would also experience my success, or failure, with the stock.

Progressives earnings per share growth have been levitating higher, like a mountain goat scaling the Alps. That EPS growth certainly has my attention, and the large insider ownership only serves to further stoke my interest. At times fast EPS growth is a sign the business has reached an inflection point; and I do like those. So yes, on this short analysis I do think its worth considering Progressive for a spot on your watchlist. Now, you could try to make up your mind on Progressive by focusing on just these factors, or you could also consider how its price-to-earnings ratio compares to other companies in its industry.

You can invest in any company you want. But if you prefer to focus on stocks that have demonstrated insider buying, here is a list of companies with insider buying in the last three months.

Please note the insider transactions discussed in this article refer to reportable transactions in the relevant jurisdiction

If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned.

We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Thank you for reading.

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I Built A List Of Growing Companies And Progressive (NYSE:PGR) Made The Cut - Simply Wall St

LAURIE DOPPMAN

The Metro-North station in the village of Brewster, which gets passengers to Manhattan in an hour.

BY EILEEN MCDERMOTT

Community News Group

Putnam County, New York: you may know it from Broadways The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee or perhaps youve gone apple picking here recently. Putnam is just north of Westchester, and youre most likely to have visited Cold Spring, which is on the Hudson River at the western end of the county, about 20 minutes south of Beacon, the Brooklyn of the Lower Hudson Valley. Cold Spring is near Breakneck Ridge and other popular hiking trails accessible by Metro-North from Manhattan.

But its less likely youve heard of communities farther east in Putnam Putnam Valley, Mahopac, Carmel, Kent, and Brewster. These are actually the more populated villages in the county, but they are less of a pull for tourists and decidedly more conservative than their counterparts on the Hudson. The particulars of their location and history have created a progressive desert of sorts even as Manhattans ongoing ejection of its middle class and swiftly-rising costs in Hudson River towns sends more progressives, including those of us in the LGBTQ community, to the eastern reaches of Putnam County.

My wife Laurie and I moved to Brewster, located at Putnams east edge, next to Danbury, Connecticut, in 2016. I had lived in Manhattan since 2001; she since 2005. Our individual love affairs with New York City had enjoyed good runs but its many wonders had begun to pale in comparison with its many inconveniences and a growing sense of angst. And as a couple we dont shun clichs: we hike, snowboard, and have a pit bull, so we looked northward in our search for a new home, anticipating woods, more space, less traffic.

After months of searching in the usual Gay Flight meccas of Beacon, Cold Spring, Peekskill, Cortlandt Manor, and other Hudson River spots, our realtor forced us to face reality we could not afford or handle a fixer-upper, and the prices and taxes for move-in ready houses in Westchester and Putnams riverfront communities were beyond us. So, she showed us a house in Brewster wherever that was.

It was perfect.

It was a modest ranch but were only two people and a dog. It had a decent sized yard, the taxes were low (around $8,500 compared to $10,000 and up in most Westchester towns), there were state-protected woods across the street, and most importantly the house had just been gut-rehabbed to be flipped. We didnt have to do a thing, and that was good, because after 15 years of depending on supers, neither of us knew an oil tank from a hot water heater. Brewster is a little further from the city than we would have liked, and we knew little about the town or surrounding area, but the village was quaint, the house four minutes from the Metro-North Harlem Line, and only an hour from Manhattan.

How different could it be?

Six months after we moved, we would find out.

On November 8, Donald Trump won the presidency, and at 3 a.m. the next morning, we were awoken to a celebratory booming bass our neighbors were elated. I had gone to bed hours earlier after sending off an angry Facebook fuck-you to no one in particular. Stirred by a party in our midst, I felt crushed, angry, and actually scared where was this place that I now lived? For weeks leading up to the election I had seen the Trump banners, bumper stickers, and lawn signs, but I wrote them off as the desperate rantings of a few local good ole boys. Turns out, there are a lot of those up here.

Five of the six officially-defined towns that make up Putnam County voted Trump in 2016. Philipstown, which includes Cold Spring, was the only one that went for Hillary. Trump won nearly 56 percent of the vote countywide and 61 percent in the town of Carmel. Compare that to Westchester County a five to ten-minute drive away where Trump got about 31 percent of the vote.

Looking at the racial makeup of Putnam County, this really shouldnt have come as a surprise according to the Census Bureau, the population is about 78 percent white, 16 percent Hispanic or Latinx, and just 3.7% black.

Yet Brewster has a large migrant worker community in the village of 2,360 residents, Hispanics/ Latinx make up 63.4 percent of the total. As of the 2010 Census, Brewster Village, which is within the Town of Southeast, had the highest concentration of Guatemalan residents in all of the US, at 38.2 percent of the population.

The villages atypical demographics for this area of Putnam County have not played out well. Some of my first encounters on local social media pages included current and former white residents of the area referring to Brewster Village as Little Mexico and to the residents in far more pejorative terms. When I challenged such comments and even called out to the page administrators to police them, I got kicked off some pages. The demographics have also resulted in a starkly segregated community as well as a proposed plan to redevelop Brewster Village in an effort to attract more white residents from New York. This is all framed in the plans language as attracting millennials, but the true intent is clear to those who live here. The redevelopment plan would bulldoze many of the villages historic buildings to the ground and replace them with condominiums and office space. If carried out, it would undoubtedly chase out a significant number of Latinx residents, many of whom own businesses in the village that would be affected or eliminated.

With many Latinx residents worried about endangering their own or family members immigration status ICE raids have surged in Putnam and Westchester lately that community has been broadly afraid to speak up in the debate over redevelopment and other public concerns.

And even as some are trying to attract city people to Brewster, the dynamics at play, in fact, dont bode well for progressive and LGBTQ newcomers. While Putnam libraries and some organizations have hosted Pride events in recent years and some schools have Gay-Straight Alliance groups, there is no nearby LGBTQ Community Center, no gay bar in Putnam or even within reasonable driving distance, and there has never been a Pride Parade. LGBTQ people and artists can often be the lifeblood of progressive communities, but without public spaces for queer people to convene and be visible, communities remain insular and conservative, keeping progressive values in the shadows.

One bright spot in Brewster is the Studio Around the Corner, owned by the Cultural Arts Coalition, a non-profit dedicated to creating and sustaining cultural arts within the Town of Southeast and its surrounding region. The Studio serves as a space for artists and theater geeks to gather, hosts ESL classes and support groups, and is spearheading an effort to restore Brewster Villages historic theater. At the same time, it is funded partially by the local Republican-run government and is sometimes pressured not to host events that might be viewed as too partisan.

Putnam needs more.

In response to this climate, Ive joined with some other Putnam residents in an effort to launch the first-ever Putnam Pride Parade in Cold Spring next year.

The event is badly needed, not just for Putnams LGBTQ residents who have nowhere to congregate, but to energize and bring visibility to the countys queer community and to ensure that the arc of New York State politics continues to bend forward rather than backward.

To be sure, other Lower Hudson Valley counties voted Trump in 2016, but Putnams margins stand alone and its local governments are broadly Republican-controlled. The County Legislature recently passed resolutions opposing the New York State Reproductive Health Act (RHA) as sanctioning infanticide and objecting to New York States Green Light bill to grant drivers licenses to undocumented immigrants. During the hearing to approve the RHA resolution, one supporter of the effort sitting near me held a sign that decried abortion on one side and homosexuality on the other as if he were hopping from one protest to another that night.

Putnam also hosts a federal government facility that may be harboring unaccompanied minors children who have been separated from their families at the border. Attempts so far to verify the conditions for these children have been largely resisted, with only one Republican elected official being granted a carefully-guided tour without a Spanish translator.

These kinds of politics persist only because the progressive community in this part of Putnam County has been silenced or become apathetic and disillusioned in light of it being a decades-long conservative stronghold. Like Beacon and Cold Spring, other communities in Putnam County have great potential for LGBTQ and other progressive families looking for more space, easy access to Manhattan via Metro-North, local arts, nature, farms, and more. But as long as the queer community is encouraged to stay quiet, the dynamic will not change.

There are certainly many forces working for change the Putnam Progressives, Putnam Young Democrats, and Putnam County Democratic Committee, to name a few with some recent successes that indicate Putnam may be trending toward change.

But we need more help. Join us for Putnam Pride on June 6 next year or lend your support, open an LGBTQ-friendly business in Putnam, or even consider moving here. If youre up for helping to foster change somewhere not too far away, Putnam needs you.

For more information on Putnam Pride, contact Eileen McDermott at putnamnypride@gmail.com.

Updated 12:05 pm, November 29, 2019

2019

Excerpt from:
In Search of Progressive Putnam - gaycitynews.nyc