Yep . Russell Simmons, founder of hip hop record label, Def Jam, has endorsed Hillary Clinton. You'd think he'll be great at persuading young African Americans. But wait. There's more.
He is a business tycoon, estimated by Wikipedia to be worth $340 million and to top it off, he's a banker, touting his Rushcard business even as he was endorsing Hillary. It ends up that Rushcard is being sued AND investigated because it left thousands of mostly poor people unable to access the funds they'd put on their cards.
NPR reported,
"Many of RushCard's customers are what the finance industry calls "underbanked" or "unbanked," meaning they do not have enough money to sustain a checking account, as The Atlantic's Gillian White explained on All Things Considered:
"They don't have the necessary credit to keep up a credit line," White told NPR's Audie Cornish. "Prepaid cards kind of fill that role where you can have money direct deposited onto it. You can load money yourself, and then you can use it in places where a debit card -- in this case, a Visa card -- would be accepted."
To be fair, Russell Simmons isn't a totally evil guy. He was supportive of Occupy Wall Street and, as a vegan, has strong opinions about the role of meat in global warming. He said today something along the lines that he's not satisfied with Bernie Sander's responses when it came to his concerns about farming. It is profoundly hard for me to imagine that Hillary will be better on the environment than Bernie Sanders. But she might be better at cutting his RushCard company slack on the investigation it is being subject to if she is elected. A banker is a banker is a banker. Hillary is at least consistent.
This will absolutely mar Russell Simmons brand and image as a progressive. Simply calling Hillary a progressive is a sign that he's full of it.
Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.
Check out his platform at RobKall.com
He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity
He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
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first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
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and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com
more detailed bio:
Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet (more...)