lpetrich
Contributor
The town-hall video was on facebook.com at RepAOC - Nov 6 evening NYC time
A staffer had some cards for showing how much time one has left to speak: 1 min, 30 sec
AOC started with mentioning the impeachment resolution in Congress, and her audience cheered. She considered it a "somber moment", but she understood the pressures that many people face from the Trump Admin -- and how we have a prospect of an end.
The housing part of her Just Society package was inspired by some reforms made this year in New York State. Offering benefits to ex-cons is a good way of helping them re-enter the mainstream of society. Ratifying the UN Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights would help get the US up to date, and she mentioned the importance of international cooperation. Isolationism makes for international weakness.
She appreciated that the mayors in the Copenhagen C40 conference agreed on a global Green New Deal. She thinks that it's the industrialized nations that will have to lead the way, and she conceded that it'll be necessary to work with China and India and other big emitters. She also said that it's important to enable developing nations to have economic development that is also low in carbon emissions.
Then universal basic income - $1K/mo - she doesn't like the idea of it as replacement for other welfare-state stuff and she thinks that it can coexist with a universal jobs guarantee. She notes that a UBI can be useful for someone in no position to do much work. She then mentions Richard Nixon talking about UBI, and how things that some Republicans proposed a half century ago would not get them called "radical leftist Democrats".
Brigid Bergin on Twitter: "At her BX town hall, @AOC takes a Q about whether she supports universal basic income (UBI). She does not support @AndrewYang's $1000 a mo policy, calling it a regressive approach that's a "Trojan horse to gut the social safety net." But she's open to other UBI policies." / Twitter
It's her questioner who mentioned Andrew Yang as proposing "libertarian bullshit".
She defends Medicare for All single-payer insurance as making possible economies of scale. Someone then asked about facial-recognition technology, and she considered it a sort of unauthorized search.
Then gentrification and how it pushes out long-time residents. And, of course, Amazon. Those promised jobs won't be for local people, she seemed to claim, and that 25,000 figure came from an Amazon press release. What she didn't like was Amazon demanding big tax breaks and other giveaways. As it turned out, Amazon didn't need big tax breaks to move to NYC. A Virginia town accepted HQ2 and its rents are going up. Then all the vacant luxury apartments in the Upper East Side of Manhattan being used as investments - about half of them. She talks to Carolyn Maloney, a Rep from there and nearby Queens.
AOC's next legislation will be some Green New Deal housing legislation, something to come out next month.
She criticizes Tucker Carlson's claim that she's anti-police, saying that people shouldn't be criminalized for not having $2.75 - she calls her stance an anti-poverty one.
Getting to student loans, she notes that she has $20,000 to go on them, and that she has cosponsored some bills to forgive them. She also notes that forgiving them is less expensive than tax cuts for billionaires and the like, and also that paying back big student loans interferes with big purchases like houses and cars. She didn't mention another one: having children.
She also thinks that tuition-free public colleges are also a necessity, to avoid repeating this big-debt problem.
About Venezuela and Honduras and the like, she thinks that US foreign policy in Latin America has been a bad-neighbor sort of policy, ignoring the region except when there is some trouble somewhere.
She thinks that some kinds of sanctions are good, like the Magnitsky Act targeting oligarchs, but that others are bad, like blanket sanctions.
I must say that I often find her positions VERY sensible, and a nice contrast to the more annoying ideological sorts of positions that I often see on the Left.
After the event, some people took pictures with her, though we saw some of that in the News-12 story. She tilted her head in one of them as she posed with someone.
A staffer had some cards for showing how much time one has left to speak: 1 min, 30 sec
AOC started with mentioning the impeachment resolution in Congress, and her audience cheered. She considered it a "somber moment", but she understood the pressures that many people face from the Trump Admin -- and how we have a prospect of an end.
The housing part of her Just Society package was inspired by some reforms made this year in New York State. Offering benefits to ex-cons is a good way of helping them re-enter the mainstream of society. Ratifying the UN Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights would help get the US up to date, and she mentioned the importance of international cooperation. Isolationism makes for international weakness.
She appreciated that the mayors in the Copenhagen C40 conference agreed on a global Green New Deal. She thinks that it's the industrialized nations that will have to lead the way, and she conceded that it'll be necessary to work with China and India and other big emitters. She also said that it's important to enable developing nations to have economic development that is also low in carbon emissions.
Then universal basic income - $1K/mo - she doesn't like the idea of it as replacement for other welfare-state stuff and she thinks that it can coexist with a universal jobs guarantee. She notes that a UBI can be useful for someone in no position to do much work. She then mentions Richard Nixon talking about UBI, and how things that some Republicans proposed a half century ago would not get them called "radical leftist Democrats".
Brigid Bergin on Twitter: "At her BX town hall, @AOC takes a Q about whether she supports universal basic income (UBI). She does not support @AndrewYang's $1000 a mo policy, calling it a regressive approach that's a "Trojan horse to gut the social safety net." But she's open to other UBI policies." / Twitter
It's her questioner who mentioned Andrew Yang as proposing "libertarian bullshit".
She defends Medicare for All single-payer insurance as making possible economies of scale. Someone then asked about facial-recognition technology, and she considered it a sort of unauthorized search.
Then gentrification and how it pushes out long-time residents. And, of course, Amazon. Those promised jobs won't be for local people, she seemed to claim, and that 25,000 figure came from an Amazon press release. What she didn't like was Amazon demanding big tax breaks and other giveaways. As it turned out, Amazon didn't need big tax breaks to move to NYC. A Virginia town accepted HQ2 and its rents are going up. Then all the vacant luxury apartments in the Upper East Side of Manhattan being used as investments - about half of them. She talks to Carolyn Maloney, a Rep from there and nearby Queens.
AOC's next legislation will be some Green New Deal housing legislation, something to come out next month.
She criticizes Tucker Carlson's claim that she's anti-police, saying that people shouldn't be criminalized for not having $2.75 - she calls her stance an anti-poverty one.
Getting to student loans, she notes that she has $20,000 to go on them, and that she has cosponsored some bills to forgive them. She also notes that forgiving them is less expensive than tax cuts for billionaires and the like, and also that paying back big student loans interferes with big purchases like houses and cars. She didn't mention another one: having children.
She also thinks that tuition-free public colleges are also a necessity, to avoid repeating this big-debt problem.
About Venezuela and Honduras and the like, she thinks that US foreign policy in Latin America has been a bad-neighbor sort of policy, ignoring the region except when there is some trouble somewhere.
She thinks that some kinds of sanctions are good, like the Magnitsky Act targeting oligarchs, but that others are bad, like blanket sanctions.
I must say that I often find her positions VERY sensible, and a nice contrast to the more annoying ideological sorts of positions that I often see on the Left.
After the event, some people took pictures with her, though we saw some of that in the News-12 story. She tilted her head in one of them as she posed with someone.
