​Position Papers

​ Twenty Actions to Fight Reclaim NY and the Constitutional Convention

September 20, 1017
1.  Contact key TV personalities and media outlets asking them to do stories or investigations about Reclaim.  Example: everybody tweet Joy Reed.

2.  Ask the Albany news radio show to cover Reclaim NY or WRVO to do one.

3.  Form an IMV subcommittee to focus on ConCon before, and then Reclaim NY, after Nov. 7, 2017.  This group would be trackers of ConCon and Reclaim NY.

4.  Short term, keep our focus on ConCon, and long term, educate people about Reclaim NY.  Maybe a billboard about ConCon.

5.  Go to school, village, and town boards.  Ask them if they have been foiled, to help get a handle on how much our communities are being targeted by Reclaim to date.

6.  Make ConCon a key component of our 2017 GOTV (get out the vote) efforts through signs and leaflets.

7.  Go to churches, Lions, and Rotary Clubs and share with them what we have learned about Reclaim NY.

8.  Increase ballot literacy for Nov. 7 so people know to flip the ballot over, and how to vote on the back.

9.  Create and distribute lawn signs for Nov. 7. “Flip it Over and Vote No.”

10.  Everybody get NYSUT signs about Con Con (one may be free, but requesting more, they cost $2 per.)

11.  Invite our speakers from tonight (Joyce St. George) to come back to speak to other organizations and in other settings.  They will come to talk to Chambers of Commerce, and additional grassroots groups.

12.  Have casual conversations with friends and neighbors about Reclaim NY.  Explain that it is attempting to make people distrust even our local government and schools, defund them, and will hurt our local community infrastructure and revitalization efforts.   Explain that Con Con is far too risky in the current political environment, and also too expensive.

13.  Go to Reclaim NY meetings.  Ask questions about their funding and their ultimate goal as well as their action steps to achieve them.  Maybe use red and green cards.

14.  Listen to Joyce’s radio show by livestream.  Every other Friday 1-2 pm on WIOXradio.org.  This week expert guest on Mercers and other billionaires behind political activity.  Last time had an expert explaining ConCon.

15.  Create a one page info sheet on ConCon (using Joyce’s material).  Use it when canvassing.

16.  Ask local 2017 candidates to put the ConCon information on their candidate materials.

17.  Create postcards for canvassing that say “Flip it over/vote No.”

18.  Send more letters to the editor to local newspapers about Reclaim and ConCon.

19.  Debunk the myth about not voting on the ConCon ballot item counts as a No on ConCon.

20.  Sign the IMV petition to ask AG Schneiderman to investigate Reclaim NY (their 501(c3)/501(c)4 conflict of interest.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
September 20, 2017
Office of the Attorney General
The Capitol
Albany, NY  12224-0341
Dear Attorney General Schneiderman:
We, the undersigned members of Indivisible Mohawk Valley, stand together in our concern over the ongoing subversive activities of Reclaim New York and request that you investigate the  group’s stated versus real purposes and methods. Though Reclaim New York purports to be a non-profit advocacy group that opposes government spending and corruption, its backers—Steve Bannon and the Robert Mercer family—are essentially engaged in a deconstruction of the administrative state.
Reclaim NY’s message threatens public education, government-sponsored programs and services, and funding for Medicaid and health care in general.  The group’s strategy is to overburden municipalities and school districts s with excessive Freedom of Information Law requests (FOILs), thereby diverting time and resources from the education of New York’s children and from city, town and village’s governmental operations.
Reclaim New York has formed the Reclaim NY Initiative, a 501(c)4, designed to fund additional efforts to sow distrust of New York institutions and disrupt or dismantle local governments. As citizens of New York State who respect the work of public educators, as well as city, county and state-sponsored agencies that provide vital services to our residents, we urge you to investigate Reclaim NY’s devices and scare tactics that may unduly influence voters through propaganda and misinformation.
Sincerely,
The Members of Indivisible Mohawk Valley
​___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
​ Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals

Indivisible Mohawk Valley is committed to promoting the values of hope and inclusion, respect for diversity and liberty for all.  We believe in and fully support our community’s welcoming spirit and its dedication to the humane acceptance and care of all refugee and immigrants.  
The recent decision by President Trump to rescind DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) is antithetical to those values.  It runs counter not only to our community’s collective embrace of refugees and immigrants but also to the principles on which our country was founded.
Dreamers are not interlopers. They are not criminals. They do not take from our economy or steal employment opportunities from citizens.  Rather, through diligent work and perseverance, they have contributed to our country’s economic and cultural strength.  They are students and soldiers; they are nurses, teachers, engineers, computer scientists. They are the best of us.
Moreover, Dreamers are innocents, here beside us not by choice, brought here as children too young to have free will.  Most have known no other home; many know only one language: English.
The President’s decision to rescind the Dreamers’ secure status in the U.S. may well not stand, as he himself has indicated in recent tweets. If in fact he plans to reverse his decision if Congress does not solve the problem for him, we can only conclude that his decision to rescind DACA is a ploy, with almost 800,000 young people being used as leverage for building a wall designed to exclude even more people from immigrating to our country.
The membership of Indivisible Mohawk Valley believes that President Trump’s actions on DACA represent a deep-seated rejection of the inclusive spirit that is the essence of Americanism. We will not be swayed nor duped by his hidden agenda: his willingness to use innocent young people to fulfill a campaign promise and thereby bolster his political capital with the alt-right base.