Posted on 07/05/2026 1:43:20 PM PDT by Libloather
A 21-year-old socialist and unpaid former NYC Council intern who claimed she was axed after demanding she and her peers get paid $32 an hour with full health benefits — and plans to sue the Council — was born into wealth.
Mina Farahmand — who willingly interned for free last year to help get fellow silver-spoon socialist Zohran Mamdani elected mayor – is the daughter of a prominent surgeon and grew up in a palatial six-bedroom, four-and-a-half-bathroom home on 30 acres in Colville, Wash.
Her father, Mehrdad Farahmand, is a general-surgery specialist at Providence, the largest health care provider in Washington State. Although his salary is not public, a current job posting for a general surgeon at Providence offers $457,269 to $555,423 in pay per year.
The elder Farahmand also owns a vacant five-and-a-half-acre lot about 10 miles away in nearby Kettle Falls, Wash., bringing his total property portfolio to nearly $1 million.
Mina Farahmand made national headlines last month after being fired from an unpaid post as a legislative intern for Councilman Harvey Epstein (D-Manhattan).
The recent New York University graduate and card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America claimed she was terminated as retaliation for spearheading a petition campaign demanding Council Speaker Julie Menin set up a fund to pay all Council interns “a living wage” of $32 hourly — nearly double NYC’s existing minimum wage of $17 an hour – plus health benefits.
Critics blasted the money move by the Gen Zer dripping with generational wealth.
“This is just another nepo-baby agitator who signed up for an unpaid internship, then demanded to be paid after the fact,” said former Councilman Robert Holden, a moderate Democrat, upon learning of Farahmand’s affluent upbringing.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Power Engineering Majors at the Maine Maritime Academy are required to complete COOPs. During the summer they coop at paper mills and power mills. Some years ago they were paid $15.00 an hour and time and a half for work over 40 hours a week and/or on weekends. They earned enough to pay for their senior year of college (or buy a pickup truck)!
Thanks.
Give her a cigar.
This started to become a thing a couple decades ago. The rationale was that kids from lower income families needed to work at anything to make ends meet while the well to do could work for free and get valuable resume points unavailable to the unwashed.
As it runs out, the well to do still get the internships based on their connections but now they are getting paid on top of it.
Yeah. And then at about 10,000 feet open the door and kick them out.
Colville, WA is a sawmill town about fifty miles north of Spokane.
Very close to the Canadian border.
Kettle Falls is another mill town. Except it has a river running through it to Lake Pend Orey.,ID
Up by 49 Degrees North Ski Area....
Been there back in the day. It was fun.
Just a few questions:
1) You worked on the job for about a month and a half with no prior work experience and feel you are now worth twice the city’s minimum wage...why?
2) What did you major in?
3) In your graduation picture, what sash is that and what does the lion represent?
Her sash appears to be the old Iranian flag - not the current one, but the pre 1980 one, before the Islamic Revolution.
I interned at the state capitol back in the early 1980’s.
Part of my job was delivering the newspapers to the 16 or so politicos my office served. It was required that I wear a suit every day and so I had 4 or 5 suits to wear in rotation.
I quickly learned that newspaper ink was not dry and came off on clothes. This led to me having to dry clean my suits once a week. It was not cheap...somewhere between $20 and $25 a week.
One day towards the end of the semester I came to work in casual clothes with my suit in a dry cleaning bag (I had to change at work for some reason). My boss saw the bag and asked how often I dry cleaned my suits. I confessed that all my suits had to be dry cleaned every week, but it was no big deal...I didn’t want to be a problem. She got all upset - I thought at me - and said she was going to take care of it.
I had visions of my duties being changed or worse my internship being ended. Instead, a couple of days later, she gave me a check for $500 to cover my dry cleaning. That would be like getting $1500 today.
Much later I found out that this was a MAJOR issue within the delegation. Interns did NOT get paid. It only was approved because it was compensating me for out of pocket expenses directly associated with my position.
Paying interns over $30 an hour means that they are not interns...they’re employees. That opens a huge can of worms.
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