Category Archives: Media corruption

Facts on BLM and the Chinese Progressive Association

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A partial list of the Hall of Shame of corporations that gave financial support to BLM (burning and looting, conspiracy and now perhaps racketeering) includes Door Dash, Amazon, Gatorade, Microsoft, 23andMe, Airbnb, Unilever, Nabisco, Dropbox, Fitbit, Cisco and Atlantic Records.

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Add in that time in the 60’s when Senator Dianne Feinstein was Mayor Feinstein and her association with the Chinese Progressive Association.

Hat tip:

Imagine that far-right demonstrators were laying siege to American cities for months, led by activists explicitly calling for an “ethno-state,” and that one of their groups was funded by an outfit involved with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. It would lead the news every day and there would be congressional hearings, right?

And rightly so. The threat of foreign interference in our domestic affairs is a serious matter, whether the suspects are rivals such as Russia or friendlies such as Mexico. This is especially the case if a foreign power were abetting unrest that aims to topple our constitutional order.

Well, the scenario described above is happening, though not with Russia or the far right, but with China and the leftist disturbances upending America and seeking to transform it.

Yet, there has not been a peep from the media or Congress about China’s support of the riots.

THE INTERACTION BETWEEN SERVICE AND ORGANIZING: TWO HOUSING CAMPAIGNS BY THE CHINESE PROGRESSIVE ASSOCIATION (95 page document)

Go to the website for the Black Futures Lab, a venture of Black Lives Matter founder Alicia Garza, and click on the “Donate” button. It will ask you to send your money to an obscure organization, the Chinese Progressive Association, explaining that “Black Futures Lab is a fiscally sponsored project of the Chinese Progressive Association.”

History of Chinese Progressive Association

The CPA was founded in San Francisco in 1972 during the heady days of the Marxist-oriented Asian American Movement, and today it also has a very active chapter in Boston. From its start, it has been a promoter of the People’s Republic of China.

According to an authoritative 2009 Stanford University paper tracing its early days to the present, and which can be found on Marxist.org, “The CPA began as a Leftist, pro-People’s Republic of China organization, promoting awareness of mainland China’s revolutionary thought and workers’ rights, and dedicated to self-determination, community control, and ‘serving the people.’”

The CPA, continued the paper, “worked with other pro-PRC groups within the U.S. and San Francisco Bay Area … Support for the PRC was based on the inspiration the members drew from what they saw as a successful grassroots model that presented a viable alternative to Western capitalism.”

One of the ways it did this was by holding “film screenings that were open to the public, sometimes showing Chinese films as well to facilitate understanding of the country’s revolutionary ideas. … CPA also took the lead with groups such as the U.S.-China People’s Friendship Organization to celebrate China’s National Day on Oct. 1”.

To this day, the CPA continues to be a partner of the PRC in the United States. Three years ago, the Boston chapter teamed up with China’s Consulate General in New York to offer Chinese nationals the opportunity to renew their passports, getting praise from China’s official mouthpiece, China Daily.

Last year, the CPA sponsored the raising of the PRC’s flag for the first time ever over Boston’s City Hall to honor the takeover of China by the Chinese Communist Party, just as the Stanford paper says has been its practice from the beginning, but this time drawing protesters. The event was organized, again, with the Chinese Consulate. Consul General Sun Guoxiang was on hand to say that, “The common interests are far more important than differences between U.S. and China.”

CPA co-founder Lydia Lowe also spoke at the event, reminding her audience that “McCarthyism is behind us. The Cold War is behind us.” In an essay she authored with other people on the Marxist revolutionary site LeftRoots last year, Lowe sounded as though she wanted to start another Cold War, writing that she wanted Asians to play a role in creating a “revolutionary strategy” that would achieve a “fundamentally different society.”

And CPA drew praise from China’s mouthpiece China Daily just a few weeks ago, for taking part again in Black Lives Matter demonstrations in San Francisco.

Black Lives Matter Opposes Capitalism

It is clear, then, that CPA works with China’s communist government, pushes its agenda here in the United States, and is regularly praised by China’s state-owned mouthpieces. It is clear, too, from, this perspective, why the CPA would sponsor a new enterprise by BLM founder Alicia Garza: they espouse the same desire for world communism.

"WE WANT AN END TO THE POLICE STATE!" Alicia Garza "Black ...

Garza sits atop a worldwide revolutionary empire, starting with the Black Lives Matter Global Network she founded, which now has 15 chapters in the U.S. and several more all over Canada, Australia, and Europe. As Foreign Affairs wrote in its September/October issue, “Today, BLM has a global network of dozens of chapters. This number will likely grow exponentially in the coming years.”

Garza is also behind the Movement for Black Lives, with its 50 domestic organizations. In July she said, “We helped to also pull together an ecosystem that was much broader than the organization that we founded, and that ecosystem is called the Movement for Black Lives and it is taking the world by storm.”

Movement for Black Lives is unabashedly anti-capitalist, saying on its website, “we are anti-capitalist. We believe and understand that Black people will never achieve liberation under the current global racialized capitalist system.”

So is Garza, and she means to use her international platform to end world capitalism. In 2015, she told an important gathering of global Marxists, “It’s not possible for a world to emerge where black lives matter if it’s under capitalism, and it’s not possible to abolish capitalism without a struggle against national oppression.”

There, she portrayed BLM as an offshoot of the Black Liberation Movement, the Marxist pan-Africanist Movement. “BLM, BLM,” she said coyly.

Last year, Garza told a roomful of Maine progressives, “We’re talking about changing how we’ve organized this country, so that we actually can achieve the justice that we are fighting for. I believe we all have work to do to keep dismantling the organizing principle of this society, which creates inequities for everyone.”

The Role of Black Futures Lab

Two years ago, Garza created the Black Futures Lab, the organization that the Chinese Progressive Association funds, as yet another asset in the vast Garza empire. By the looks of it, it acts as a sort of a lobbying arm of this empire.

As Colorlines put it when it was launched on Sept. 26, 2018, Black Futures Lab “seeks to engage advocacy organizations and legislators to advance local-, state- and federal-level policies that make Black communities stronger. It will also craft strategies that harness Black political power to bring those policies to fruition.”

“Today, we are launching the Black Futures Lab as a way to mobilize around our needs, hopes, and dreams,” Garza told Colorlines in an emailed statement. “For too long, people have spoken for us and perpetuated false representations of the issues that drive our votes.”

This legislative clout adds to the organizing muscle that The Black Lives Matters Global Network and Movement for Black Lives organizations already bring.

As I wrote at City Journal last month, the BLM organizations have been the nerve center of this year’s protests: “They have been laying the groundwork for years, carefully cultivating a network of groups that could organize protests when the moment came and amplify the message through social media.”

Communist China has put its vast propaganda apparatus to work in support of the mayhem that has wreaked havoc in American cities this year. China is, after all, a rival of the United States, and would see weakening of U.S. society and the country in general as advantageous.

The involvement of an outfit as closely associated with the Chinese government in the funding of one of Garza’s ventures is something else entirely, however.

Maybe journalists and congressmen have not seen it till now (I myself hadn’t until Jenny Nguyen, a graduate of The Heritage Foundation’s Young Leaders Program, alerted me to it).

But now they have.

More detail here on the founders of BLM

Trump Announces 1776 Commission

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Patriotism, factual history and civics could make a comeback in the education system. FINALLY and one must remember civics was replaced in the public school system with ‘social studies’. What is social studies anyway and does it really teach about the founding documents, the Founders themselves, the structure of government and fundamental natural law? Yeah, not so much. There are countless politicians that need refresher courses and most media does as well.

File:The Second Continental Congress voting independence ...

President Donald Trump announced on Thursday he would sign a new executive order establishing the “1776 Commission” to promote patriotic education. The commission will counter the revisionist history peddled by leftist efforts like the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which imposes false narratives on America’s students.

“The narratives about America being pushed by the far left and being chanted in the streets bear a striking resemblance to the anti-American propaganda of our adversaries,” Trump said in remarks during the White House Conference on American History at the National Archives. He further described the 1619 Project—a collection of essays that cast America as an irredeemably racist empire built solely to oppress minorities—as “ideological poison.”

**

Earlier this year, China successfully weaponized American wokeness to drive divisions deeper in the U.S., seeking to evade responsibility for the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak by complaining that any term linking the virus to its Chinese origins was racist. Woke reporters soon complied with Beijing’s orders and began badgering the president repeatedly on his use of terms consistent with the naming of new diseases.

“Critical race theory, the 1619 Project, and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda,” Trump said, “that if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together. It will destroy our country.”

**

Trump’s announcement marks the latest example of the White House’s decision to engage substantively in the culture war, coming less than two weeks after the administration banned critical race theory trainings at federal agencies.

The new 1776 Commission, Trump said, “will encourage our educators to teach our children about the miracle of American history and make plans to honor the 250th anniversary of our founding.”

Several Republican House members also ramped up their efforts to counter the 1619 Project, which has already infected K-12 curriculums in some 4,500 classrooms. Earlier Thursday, Reps. Ken Buck of Colorado and Rick Allen of Georgia introduced the House companion bill to legislation from Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton that would bar federal funding from schools incorporating the 1619 Project in their curriculums.

Launched last year, the progressive project spearheaded by the Times’ riot-cheering Nikole Hannah-Jones (who won a Pulitzer for the project’s opening essay, even though it required a major correction) has made its way into the classrooms of major schools districts such as Chicago and Washington D.C.

Watch a short documentary debunking the project here:

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FinCen Flagged Hunter Biden for Money-Laundering

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Adam Schiff is way too quiet on this….and not only is Hunter not returning phone calls, but the Biden presidential campaign wont respond either.

Hunter Biden Has No Regrets For Serving On Ukrainian Gas ...

JTN: Treasury Department agency that polices financial threats such as money laundering flagged several foreign transactions to Hunter Biden-connected businesses as “suspicious” during the end of the Obama administration and the beginning of the Trump administration.

The concerns from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) were highlighted in Suspicious Activity Reports turned over to Senate committees over the last year in conjunction with investigations into the Russia and Ukraine scandals, according to several officials familiar with the evidence.

As those Senate investigations wind toward the issuance of their first official report later this month, an essential question has emerged: Did U.S. law enforcement or intelligence agencies do anything to determine if the money flowing to Vice President Joe Biden’s son posed any criminal or intelligence threats? Officials at Treasury, FBI and the Office of Director of National Intelligence declined comment.

Senate Democrats first called attention to the existence of the SARs in a little-noticed letter late last year and are now bracing for the flagged financial transactions to be a major revelation in a joint report they expect to be published by the GOP-led Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and the Senate Finance Committees as early as next week.

“The Republicans have had this in their back pocket for some time to make headlines as the election drew closer,” one Democratic source told Just the News.

A lawyer for Hunter Biden did not return a call requesting comment. Spokesmen for the two Senate committees declined comment.

The SAR reports were requested as Senate investigators dug into a labyrinth of global businesses that Hunter Biden and his business partners became involved with in Russia, China, Ukraine and elsewhere while his father Joe Biden served as the vice president and Obama administration foreign policy point person. That includes Hunter Biden’s controversial addition in spring 2014 to the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas firm with a long record of corruption allegations.

SARs are one of the law enforcement community’s most powerful and secretive tools in the war against money laundering, drug cartels and terrorist threats, providing real-time warnings from financial institutions to FinCEN that certain transactions have characteristics that make them suspicious. The origin, size and routing channels are just some of the components that can lead a transaction to be flagged.

Treasury typically receives or generates one million to two million Suspicious Activity Reports a year. So a SAR report in and of itself is not evidence of wrongdoing, but it is usually a starting point for investigation, experts say. The question that remains is whether FBI or ODNI did anything to investigate these suspicious reports after they were alerted by FinCEN.

The American suspicious transaction reports turned over to the Senate committees are the second known instance of red flags raised about foreign money flowing into business firms associated with Hunter Biden.

In February 2016, the Latvian government sent a warning to Ukrainian prosecutors that several payments from Burisma to an account in New York controlled by Hunter Biden’s Rosemont Seneca Bohai firm appeared suspicious, according to a copy of the letter obtained by Just the News and Latvian authorities.

“The Office for Prevention of Laundering of Proceeds Derived from Criminal Activity … is currently investigating suspicious activity of Burisma Holdings Limited,” the Latvian agency, also known as the FIU, wrote to Ukraine’s financial authorities.

The letter was confirmed earlier this year by the Latvian embassy to the United States.

The Latvian law enforcement letter identified a series of loan payments totaling about $16.6 million that were routed from companies in Belize and the United Kingdom to Burisma through Ukraine’s PrivatBank between 2012 and 2015.

The flagged funds were “partially transferred” to Hunter Biden, a board member at Burisma since May 2014, and three other officials working for the Ukrainian natural gas company, according to the Latvian letter.

The letter asked Ukrainian officials for any evidence about whether the funds were involved in corruption and whether Ukrainian officials were investigating Burisma and the recipients of the money.

“On the grounds of possible legalization of proceeds derived from criminal activity and corruption, please grant us permission to share the information included in the reply to this request with Latvian law enforcement entities for intelligence purposes only,” the letter said.

Latvian authorities said they did not get any incriminating information back from Ukraine to warrant further investigation and did not take additional action in 2016.

Hunter Biden’s globe-trotting business activities have long generated controversy because they often occurred in the shadows of his father’s foreign policy portfolio. Hunter Biden, for instance, traveled aboard Air Force Two in December 2013 with the vice president to Beijing, walking away soon after with a stake in an investment fund that received funding from the state-owned Bank of China. As his father’s administration took several actions favorable to Beijing, such as opening U.S. capital markets to Chinese companies, Hunter Biden closed deals in China.

One of those involved the sale of an iconic American auto parts manufacturer called Henniges in Michigan, in which Hunter Biden’s firm helped a Chinese military aircraft maker acquire a controlling stake in 2015. The transaction was approved by the Obama administration despite the facts that the Chinese firm had been sanctioned five prior times by the U.S. government for nefarious activity and that less than 15 months prior one of the Chinese firm’s subsidiaries was placed on a black list by the U.S. government for ties to the Chinese military.

Similarly, Hunter Biden was added to the Burisma board in May 2014 just weeks after his father implored Ukraine to expand its natural gas production. Burisma faced multiple corruption investigations, and State Department memos show the U.S. government reported just months after Hunter Biden joined the firm’s board that Burisma allegedly paid a $7 million bribe to Ukrainian prosecutors designed to make the corruption allegations go away.

State officials also testified during last year’s impeachment proceedings that the Bidens created the appearance of a conflict of interest that undercut Joe Biden’s efforts to stamp out corruption in Ukraine.

FBI officials obtained records in an unrelated investigation showing Burisma paid more than $3 million from foreign accounts to a New York investment account tied to Hunter Biden.

Senate investigators have also spent some time investigating real estate investments that Hunter Biden and his business partner Devon Archer were involved in. The investigators’ interest was piqued by evidence that some of the investments received large support from a Russian oligarch and philanthropist based in London named Yelena Baturina, Russia’s only female billionaire and the wife of the late Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov.

Board minutes obtained by the FBI in an unrelated 2017-18 investigation of Archer state that Archer told investors during a 2014 meeting that he had secured upwards of $200 million from Baturina’s real estate businesses in London.

“Mr. Archer further discussed the possible sale of his company and the revenues that might be realized, which he said would be a big liquidity event for him, as well as his connections with Bohai, which he said was sponsored by major banks and institutional investors in China,” according to the minutes. “He also discussed his client relationship with Yelena Baturina, who he said had invested over $200 million dollars in his various investment funds. Mr. Archer emphasized that he had ample funding, but that the investors wanted to be efficient,” the memo read.

You can read those board minutes here:

Baturina’s office in London did not respond to a email request for comment, nor did lawyers for Hunter Biden or Archer.

The Sinister Billionaire Backers of the Insurrection

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Let’s begin here shall we? Know who is financing and attempting to control the fate of America.

Dori: Seattle riots a stunning failure of political leadership

In part from the Washington Times:

Billionaire Democratic donor George Soros bankrolled the successful campaigns of a new crop of district attorneys who now preside over big cities with skyrocketing crime and frayed relationships with police departments.

LAWLESS: Philadelphia’s New Soros Backed DA Launches Plan ...

Soros-backed DAs in Philadelphia, St. Louis, San Francisco and other cities have fired scores of experienced prosecutors and, as promised, stopped prosecuting low-level quality-of-life crimes such as disorderly conduct, vagrancy and loitering.

Their laissez-faire criminal justice philosophy bucks the get-tough “broken windows” approach, made famous by then-New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, which targets minor offenses to cut off the criminal element in the bud. More here.

Now for more from Julie Kelly.

As I reported last week, a cabal of Democrats and NeverTrump Republicans are plotting a post-election civil war of sorts to make sure Joe Biden assumes the presidency even if Donald Trump legitimately wins. “It’s insurrection,” President Trump said on Fox News last week when asked about the widely-circulated plan. “We’ll put them down very quickly if they do that.”

Let’s hope. A document released last month by the Transition Integrity Project, a headfake name to give the depraved group the appearance of decency, is a shocking battle plan that would plunge the country into more chaos. The same agitators on the Left and NeverTrump Right who’ve stoked nonstop political upheaval over the past four years will exploit our current instability to throw the election to the Democrats.

But this is more than the far-fetched hallucinations of political outcasts. The mayhem they’ve been war-gaming will be heavily funded by a number of Trump-hating billionaires, and those people have no intention of losing out on their investment.

The mostly behind-the-scenes attempt between Election Day and Inauguration Day to prevent Donald Trump from taking office the first time—one that miraculously failed despite help from the media and the most powerful government agencies in the world—will go public in 2020. And instead of help from James Comey, Jim Clapper, or John Brennan, the 2020 version will be bolstered by the likes of George Soros, Tom Steyer, Pierre Omidyar, a member of the Rupert Murdoch family, and Big Tech titans among others.

One of the co-founders of the Transition Integrity Project is Rosa Brooks. The Georgetown law professor and Obama Administration alum is a former counsel and board member for the Open Society Foundation, created in 1993 by George Soros. The foundation is a massive donor to hundreds of left-wing causes around the world; in July, Open Society Foundation announced a five-year, $150 million investment in “racial justice” groups including Black Lives Matter.

In 2018, Soros’ two largest foundations reported more than $14 billion in assets.

In a recent Washington Post op-ed, Brooks put the country on notice; unless Joe Biden wins in a landslide, we will be sorry. “With the exception of the ‘big Biden win’ scenario, each of our exercises reached the brink of catastrophe, with massive disinformation campaigns, violence in the streets and a constitutional impasse,” she warned. That reaction will occur, according to the simulations, even if Trump wins the Electoral College but loses the popular vote.

But Brooks isn’t the only connection between deep-pocketed foes of Donald Trump and the post-election insurrection.  Another new group, Protect the Results, is working hand-in-hand with Brooks “to mobilize if Donald Trump refuses to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election . . . [and] prepare for a potential post-election crisis.”

Protect the Results lists dozen of sponsors which in reality are mostly funded by only a handful of anti-Trump tycoons.

George Soros: One of Protect the Results main organizers is a nonprofit called Indivisible. Based out of Washington, D.C., Indivisible was founded in 2016 after Trump’s election; according to a political watchdog, Indivisible’s main donor is the Tides Foundation, a Soros-financed pass through organization.

“Started as a Google document detailing techniques for opposing the Republican agenda under Mr. Trump, [Indivisible] now has a mostly Washington-based staff of about 40 people, with more than 6,000 volunteer chapters across the country,” the New York Times reported in 2017. That year, Indivisible raised nearly $8 million, a figure we presume is much higher in 2020. The group’s policy director is a former advisor for an immigration advocacy center partially funded by grants from Soros.

Other Soros-funded entities including MoveOn.org, People for the American Way, 350Action, and Women’s March are listed as Protect the Results partners. In an interview last month, Soros, a longtime Trump nemesis, suggested the president will be indicted if he loses in November “because he has violated the Constitution in many different ways.” One scenario war-gamed out by the post-election plotters is criminal charges brought against Donald Trump and his associates for unspecified crimes.

Pierre Omidyar: The founder of eBay has poured tens of millions into projects headed by NeverTrump “conservatives” including former Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol since 2017.

Omidyar, whose net worth is around $17 billion, this week issued a blueprint for how to “reimagine capitalism in America” which would “ensure that people who have been historically and systematically marginalized by structural racism, colonialism, paternalism, and indifference will have opportunity, power, and the self determination that comes from economic prosperity and a vibrant, fair, and responsive democracy.”

Most of Omidyar’s largess has been directed to left-wing causes and Democratic candidates over the years but he found political soulmates on the NeverTrump Right. Two NeverTrump outfits—Republicans for the Rule of Law and Stand Up Republic—are Protect the Results partners. Stand Up Republic is fronted by NeverTrumper Evan McMullin; Republicans for the Rule of Law, headed by Kristol, is one of many groups that receives grants from Omidyar’s vast network.

Kristol participated in the post-election tabletop exercises and bragged on Twitter that he had played the role of President Trump.

James and Kathryn Murdoch: The son and daughter-in-law of Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch are spending lots of money to separate themselves from the family’s conservative legacy. James resigned from the company’s board in July over disputes with the cable news channel’s “editorial content.”

The Murdochs, worth a reported $2 billion, are donors to Kristol’s Republicans for the Rule of Law and another Kristol-operated group, Defending Democracy Together, which is spending tens of millions on advertisements in swing states featuring purported Republicans planning to vote for Joe Biden. (The Murdochs also support the former vice president.)

Defending Democracy Together publishes The Bulwark, an online magazine that replaced Kristol’s now-defunct Weekly Standard. The blog houses a number of NeverTrumper editors and writers including Charles Sykes and Mona Charen. The Bulwark, like other NeverTrump organs, is pushing the idea that the president, not the Democrats or Joe Biden, won’t accept the results of the election. (Omidyar also supports Defending Democracy Together.)

Tom Steyer: NextGen America, fronted by failed Democratic presidential candidate and multi-billionaire Tom Steyer, is involved in Protect the Results. Steyer spent $123 million in the 2018 election cycle; NextGen America will spend at least $45 million to help elect Joe Biden by persuading young voters to use mail-in ballots. While lamenting out-of-control wildfires in his home state, Steyer told CNN on Monday that the only solution to the alleged climate crisis is “honest to God, Joe Biden.”

While this list covers the anti-Trump vehicles offically bankrolling the post-election revolt, it does not account for the unquantifiable in-kind donations by Big Tech. As I will detail in my next column, Silicon Valley already is seeding the ground for a Biden victory at all costs by using a combination of censorship and intimidation aimed not just at Republican voters but at the president himself—involvement that can justifiably be described as election interference on a scale our foreign adversaries could only dream of.

 

 

Mayor De Blasio Furloughs his Entire Office and Staff

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Homeless population hits another record high under de Blasio

And Governor Cuomo has the authority to remove De Blasio due to malfeasance and dereliction of duty…..meanwhile, garbage piles up, rats are more common than people and simply, New York City smells and smells badly. But the homeless are living in luxury hotels.

Average New Yorker Produces Over 2 Pounds of Garbage Per ...

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) announced Wednesday that all members of his mayoral staff — including himself — will be subject to a mandatory one-week furlough due to the city’s massive revenue shortfall amid coronavirus lockdowns.

The policy, which forces city employees to essentially take an unpaid vacation sometime between October and March, will affect 495 people, including de Blasio himself and first lady Chirlane McCray, the New York Times reported.

The forced furlough comes as de Blasio has so far failed to petition New York state for longterm borrowing or the federal government for a stimulus bailout.

It is a largely symbolic move as it is expected to yield $860,000 in savings — a mere drop in the bucket compared to the city’s $9 billion, two-year revenue shortfall.

In recent weeks, the embattled mayor has threatened laying off 22,000 city workers unless the city receive a bailout of some kind. But so far, state and federal officials have balked at his warnings.

President Donald Trump, for one, has voiced opposition to granting federal bailouts to Democratic states and cities, which he argued suffered from significant fiscal mismanagement long before the virus.

On Wednesday, de Blasio took on a more somber tone in making the announcement.

“This is a step you never want to see for good, hardworking people, the folks who work here throughout this crisis,” the mayor said. “So it is with pain that I say they and their families will lose a week’s pay.”

“We have to make tough choices to move this city forward and keep our budget balanced,” he added.

During the news conference, de Blasio made sure to call on constituents yet again to push their federal and state representatives to act on behalf of the city.

“We’ll keep fighting for those bigger changes,” he said.

Speaking with the Times, Citizens Budget Commission President Andrew Rein argued that, now six months into the pandemic, the mayor should have already produced a plan to tackle the debt.

“It would be great if this helps dislodge that inertia,” Rein said. “It’s hard to say if it will.”

In contrast, Bill Neidhardt, a spokesman for the mayor, hailed the move as “a significant gesture that reasserts City Hall recognizes the sacrifices that will have to be made across the board if we don’t get a stimulus or borrowing.”

Fox News reported that with a mayoral salary of $258,541 per year, de Blasio is set to lose just short of $5,000 during his weeklong furlough.

***

Deeper dive:

In part: Adding to New York’s woes, hotel stays are down, millions are working remotely or out of a job entirely and as many as one-third of its 230,000 small businesses could close for good, according to the Partnership for New York City, a nonprofit organization that represents local firms. The devastation has left no part of the economy untouched, even hamstringing the sprawling network of bus and train lines that make up the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Without a $12 billion cash infusion, MTA leaders sounded their own dire alarm this week: They may have to scale back some services as much as 40 percent, leaving riders facing longer waits and postponing some sorely needed repairs to the subway’s aging infrastructure.

Even in a quarrelsome city like New York, there’s widespread agreement about a solution: additional help from Washington, where federal lawmakers have spent months discussing the need to authorize billions of dollars for cash-strapped local governments that saw revenue decline precipitously as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

But that money increasingly seems out of reach for New York and thousands of states, counties, cities and towns nationwide facing their own financial headaches. Drastic measures once viewed as unlikely doomsday scenarios have become more real and urgent, threatening not only the day-to-day functions of New York City, but also the millions of people it serves.

Shutdowns ordered by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) and other leaders brought the city to an abrupt halt, arresting the spread of the virus at the cost of the state’s economy.

The financial pain has been particularly pronounced in New York City. Broadway went dark this spring, and even as the outbreak wanes, theaters haven’t been able to revive operations safely. Major events that bring travelers to the city annually, from concerts and baseball games to the U.N. General Assembly, have been canceled or postponed. Some restaurants that shuttered never reopened. Some offices that sent their employees home never brought them back. And some workers who lost jobs were never rehired in a city where the unemployment rate last month hovered around 20 percent, data show.