Bill Samuels

Bill Samuels
Born	(1943-02-10) February 10, 1943 Richmond, Virginia, USA
Alma mater	MIT, Harvard Law School
Occupation	Businessman and politician
Known for	Political activism- Blue Tiger Democrats, Effective NY, New Roosevelt, 970 The Answer radio talk show
Home town	Canandaigua, NY
Movement	Democratic Party
Spouse(s)	Marie Samuels
Children	Kitty (Kathryn) Samuels
Parents	Howard Samuels (father) Barbara Samuels (mother)
Website	http://effectiveny.org, http://am970theanswer.com/pages/wide/bill-samuels, http://www.newroosevelt.com

William Christie "Bill" Samuels is a New York City-based progressive Democrat, businessman, founder and chairman of the board of the good government group EffectiveNY and the EffectiveNY Howard Samuels Policy Center. He is also a host of Effective Radio on AM970.^[1]

Samuels has been active in progressive politics since organizing against the Vietnam War in the 1970s. In his business career, he built ACTV, Inc. which developed patents for interactive television. The company was sold to an affiliate of Liberty Media.^[2]

Samuels is the son of Howard J. Samuels (December 3, 1919 – October 26, 1984), an American statesman, industrialist, civil rights activist and philanthropist who served as U.S. Under Secretary of Commerce and Director of the Small Business Administration under President Johnson, and special advisor to the campaign for president by John F. Kennedy and the administration of President Carter.^{[3] [4]}

Early life and background

Samuels was raised in upstate New York in Canandaigua, the son of Howard and Barbara Samuels. His father Howard J. Samuels served as U.S. Under Secretary of Commerce under President Lyndon B. Johnson and was Director of the Small Business Administration and founded Kordite, now known as Pactive.^[5] In 1974 his father ran for Governor with Mario Cuomo as his Lieutenant Governor ultimately losing to Hugh Carey.

Samuels was active in his father's campaign as a young adult. He developed an immense desire to be politically active and stand up for minorities, against corruption, and towards general equity and fairness in politics.

Bill Samuels attended MIT where he earned undergraduate degrees in political science, economics, and engineering. He later graduated from Harvard Law School.^[6]

Samuels built an education company, APC Skills, for entry level workers, with divisions in Brazil, Europe, Mexico, and Asia ^[6] that merged in 1987 with the Alexander Proudfoot company. In 1988, it became a publicly traded company on the London exchange (symbol MMC).^[7] Subsequently, he built ACTV, a public company on the NASDAQ (symbol IATV) ^[8] which was responsible for 50 patents on intellectual property specifically for interactive television which led to a sale of the company to an affiliate of Liberty Media.^[6]

Samuels has partnered with this brother Howard C. Samuels in his drug treatment center in Los Angeles, known as the Hills Treatment Center.^[9]

Samuels lives with his daughter, Kitty, and his wife, Marie, in downtown NYC.

Today his main passion for political reform still stands. His real work is getting involved in NY politics when he deems reform and activism necessary.

1970s activism

In 1971, Samuels became involved in the anti-war movement and raised money for the 1971 Vietnam Veterans Against the War March on Washington.^[10] Samuels participated in a lawsuit against the 1972 Democratic National Convention along with Shirley Chisholm and others, that argued that the one man, one vote Supreme Court ruling required one Democrat, one-vote apportionment of delegates at the 1972 Democratic Convention. The lawsuit failed.^[11] He was also a founding member of the Council on Economic Priorities (CEP) with Alice Tepper Marlin which was involved with promoting social investment.^[12]

Political career

Legal advocacy

Samuels filed a civil rights lawsuit against the Gramercy Park Trust in 2001 after groups of fourth and fifth grades were removed from the park.^[13] The lawsuit ended with a large financial settlement for the students for the treatment they had received.

New York State Senate Democratic campaign

Samuels founded the Blue Tiger Democrats in 2004, a research project that studied in Michigan and New York on how to use civic engagement to reconnect the Democratic Party to its communities between election cycles.^[14] In 2005 Samuels turned his attention to reforming Albany and provided the initial funding for a liberal blog that runs issue and advocacy campaigns known as the Albany Project.^[15][16]

In 2006 and 2007, Samuels was a speaker at the Milken Institute Global Conference. His speeches focused on how to make political parties and the process more respected.^[17]

In 2006, he was named by Eliot Spitzer as Vice Finance Chairman for the New York Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, and became Chairman in 2008, regaining control of the New York State Senate for the Democratic Party for the first time in decades.^[18][19] However, the new Democratic leadership soon lost their majority when Democratic Senator Pedro Espada defected to the Republican Party.^[20]

2010 Lieutenant Governor campaign

In April 2010, Bill Samuels announced his campaign for lieutenant governor, independent of Andrew Cuomo.^[21] Samuels had a new vision for the role, which was to leverage the position's ceremonial role as State Senate President to achieve what he believed to be fundamental change in Albany through pillars of reform: Fiscal reform, Redistricting reform, Campaign finance reform, ethics reform.

However, after discussions with the Andrew Cuomo campaign, and their promise^[22] to change the old culture of how Albany was run, Samuels ended his campaign in order to focus his energy on New Roosevelt's effort to oust corrupt Senator Pedro Espada and bring reform to Albany.^[23] Nevertheless, Cuomo never followed up on his promises.

Independent Expenditure Committee

Samuels formed the New Roosevelt Initiative, an independent expenditure committee concerned with New York’s fiscal practices, ethics rules, redistricting policies, and campaign finance practices.^[24] In 2009, New Roosevelt hired Benjamin Kallos as Executive Director.^[25]

Samuels and New Roosevelt were among the first to call for unity behind Gustavo Rivera who he endorsed in July 2010.^[26] New Roosevelt opened an office in the Bronx, built a field organization, did eight direct mailings and organized a large get out the vote effort. On September 15, 2010, Gustavo Rivera defeated the disgraced incumbent Espada by a margin of nearly 2 to 1.^[27] Since the election, Senator Pedro Espada has been convicted of civil and criminal charges.^[28]

Common Cause honored him with the Common Cause Democracy in Action award at their annual awards dinner on Tuesday November 29, 2011.^[29]

Constitutional change

In January 2012, Samuels, concerned with Cuomo’s lack of commitment to fundamentally changing how Albany functions, launched the Citizens Committee for an Effective Constitution at EffectiveNY.org that was devoted to raising awareness of New York State constitutional changes that he believed would increase transparency and end corrupt practices.^[30] EffectiveNY.org focused on a wide range of needed reforms from high profile issues like campaign finance and redistricting to those that are often unknown but equally important like the message of necessity. ^[31]

The effort was bipartisan, with Samuels, an active Democrat, teaming up with Republican Assembly Minority Leader Brian Kolb and Professor Gerald Benjamin from SUNY New Paltz.^[32] In 2017 the voters will decide if there should be a Constitutional Convention.^[33]

Samuels’ father, Howard Samuels, had created a similar bi-partisan organization by the same name in 1965 that proposed many of the same recommendations for reform that remain undone today.^[34]

Redistricting

Samuels helped finance a losing lawsuit to challenge the constitutionality of the gerrymandered New York State Senate lines following the 2000 Census.

2014 Lieutenant Governor campaign

In an effort to get Cuomo to endorse progressive stands,^[35] Samuels announced in 2014 he was mulling another bid for Lieutenant Governor against Kathy Hochul, who if elected would be the first Democratic woman elected to the post in decades, an announcement which drew consternation from several elected female Democratic lawmakers.^[36] Hochul was the running mate of incumbent Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo.

Samuels said of Governor Cuomo, "When history is written, he'll just be a mediocre governor that had a Nixon personality."^[37] In June 2014 Samuels announced he would not be a candidate for Lieutenant Governor.^[38]

Effective Radio

In 2015, Samuels began hosting a radio program on AM 970 The Answer.^[1]

See also

• Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry
• Milken Institute Global Conference

References

External links

• New Roosevelt
• The Hills Treatment Center
• EffectiveNY