She thinks that ballot-box politics often catches up to what activists are doing, like Black Lives Matter activists. About the gun-rights protest in Richmond, VA - hardly any cops. While BLM and other protests on the Left often have oodles of cops in riot gear. She suspects that a lot of Democratic Party officials consider activism a "nuisance". Republicans in swing districts dig in their heels, while Democrats in such districts try to act like conservatives. Need both activism and being in office.
This seems fair, as far as left-wing activists go, although it can be in fits and starts. The wild overreactions by cops in Ferguson and Bmore are certainly part of what caused Obama to say "You guys are really abusing this military surplus, so we're suspending the program", although Sessions reversed it. They've also led to local DAs reforming who they prosecute, who is held with bail versus who doesn't, etc.
TNC then suspected that a reason that Republicans embrace their activists and Democrats don't is because of the influence of Wall Street - big-money donors. Like having fancy dinners in wine caves with fancy chandeliers. AOC said that the Democratic Party is not a "left party" but a "center or center-conservative party". "We can't even get a floor vote for Medicare for All." Even one that gets voted down.
She thinks it "flawed" that we can capitalism our way out of poverty. She noted two-party vs. multiparty systems, even if she was unfamiliar with Duverger's law. She thinks that people can identify more easily with some party in a multiparty system. Then Puerto Rico and how PROMESA extracts wealth created in that island for Wall Street, not leaving much for that island. How many Puerto Ricans don't feel that the US government doesn't care for them very much. She stands by her describing PR as a colony of the US.
This is the clip on Twitter, minus the part on Puerto Rico. A lot of people misquoted it as "center-right", but given her education, there's a good chance she meant "conservative" to mean "preserving norms", rather than "banning abortion". And at this point, it's very hard to argue that the GOP are anything but far-right radicals. - the poor should have the highest tax rate, deny all refugees entry, ban all birth control, suppress voters of particular skin colors and ethnicities, ignore obvious lawlessness by Our President, ignore/destroy any evidence that disagrees with your desired conclusion, insist that a Nazi wannabe rally (which was planned as a violent event) is better than a sports player kneeling during the national anthem - these are all wild departures from where we've been the past 50-60 years. And as far as the overall party goes, yeah, it's pretty close to the center.
Then on some rich person saying that he knows better about how to manage his resources than the government does. AOC was very critical of that. To her, it was like saying that businesses must be exploitative, that we can't have worker-owned cooperatives. Then, at least in theory, that the government is the people. Then about billionaires, that they don't do the actual work, that it was their employees who did it, and often underpaid ones. "So no one ever makes a billion dollars. You take a billion dollars." - the exact opposite of the Randroid theory so popular among capitalism apologists, that it is business leaders who are the real workers in their businesses.
She doesn't mean to imply that all billionaires are corrupt, however, just that the nature of the system produces grotesque concentrations of wealth. After how political and economic systems come and go, "No one talks about the dangerous King. No one talks about the anti-capitalist King. No one talks about the anti-poverty King." Then about how we are at the edges of an untenable system that is starting to crack. She doesn't consider charity wrong, but she asks where the money will go. As to what a billionaire could do, she says that she wouldn't want his money, but instead that he reform his business so that employees have more of a say in it. Like worker cooperatives. "I don't want your money as much as we want your power. The people, not me ... that's going to get cut and clipped."
She likes what unions fought for in the early 20th cy: 8 hours of work, 8 hours of leisure, and 8 hours of sleep. Those 8 hours could be used for family and community activities. But that's been eroded with increasing work hours.
And it's impossible to argue with evidence, that the past 30 years have actually been good for the average family. If anything, the kids graduating today are likely to be either in the military, or in a job that won't allow them to buy a house or retire without massive help from their families. And while MLK wasn't exactly anti-capitalism, he certainly wouldn't approve of neoliberalism. As far as knowing his quotes go, I'm surprised at how little people know about things he's said and written. I'm not an MLK scholar, but folks are insisting he'd endorse Sanders in the primary, or Trump in the general (both are ridiculous assertions, assuming the Boondocks "King fell into a coma when he was shot and woke up just now" scenerio), that he'd insist on black people pulling themselves up by the bootstraps (he specifically and repeatedly spoke of the masive assistance white families received that black families were denied), or that he'd hate Black Lives Matter (He'd fully agree with nonviolent protest against police brutality, as well as their various charity efforts).
She talked about having the more luxurious sorts of things -- that it's having something that one is not supposed to have. She talked about how when she got to her Congress office, that she felt that she was not supposed to have that office plaque, that she slipped in through a crack in the system. So TNC's Jordans are OK - "live in it while fighting for a better world.
Yes, it's common to note that you still have to liv in the world, and there's often no point in taking a vow of poverty in the US.
James Earl Ray may not have been part of a conspiracy, but he had the motivation:
on Democratic socialist #MLKDay https://t.co/Neidip4wP3" / Twitter
