Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

[lpetrich]

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "Because “no tax evasion” and “no insurance fraud” don’t quite have the same ring to it.… " noting Aaron Rupar on Twitter: "Instead of saying “hi” Trump now greets people with, “no collusion, no collusion.” https://t.co/Pj70oF0DgG"

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "Sandy Hook happened 6 years ago and we can’t even get the Senate to hold a vote on universal background checks w/ #HR8. Christchurch happened, and within days New Zealand acted to get weapons of war out of the consumer market. This is what leadership looks like … https://t.co/iKiW8zKTNu" noting Keith Boykin on Twitter: "“Today I am announcing that New Zealand will ban all military-style semi-automatic weapons.” - New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Arden https://t.co/QcCNPxBhHW"

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "Last year, I woke up to organize w/ my community & waitressed to make ends meet. Today, staggeringly, I woke up to this. I believe in an America where all things are possible. Where a basic, dignified life isn’t a dream, but a norm. That’s why I got up then,& why I get up now.… https://t.co/cL95OAmz1j" noting TIME on Twitter: "TIME’s new cover: “Change is closer than we think.” Inside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s unlikely rise [url]https://t.co/qV0hB6qDRd… https://t.co/f3DfoCAZe9"[/url]
Inside Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Unlikely Rise | Time

Every 10 minutes or so, someone knocks on the big wooden door of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s office on Capitol Hill. The noise makes staffers stiffen. It’s almost always a harmless fan, one of dozens who arrive each day, leaving neon-colored Post-it notes as devotional offerings. But in her first three months in Congress, aides say, enough people have threatened to murder Ocasio-Cortez that Capitol Police trained her staff to perform risk assessments of her visitors.

This is the daily reality for America’s newest human Rorschach test. Wonder Woman of the left, Wicked Witch of the right, Ocasio-Cortez has become the second most talked-about politician in America, after the President of the United States.

After noting her defeat of a 10-term incumbent and her successes in changing political conversations, "Her Twitter following has climbed from about 49,000 last summer to more than 3.5 million." Like many celebrities, she has had to go into hiding. “I miss being able to go outside in sweats,” ... “I can’t go anywhere in public and just be a person without a lot of people watching everything I do.”

Back to the article.

Her allies plan to boost primary challengers to moderate and conservative Democrats, a push that Ocasio–Cortez has distanced herself from but one that has earned her the enmity of some colleagues. Many House Democrats resent her celebrity and worry it overshadows efforts to reach the moderate voters who propelled the party to the majority. Privately, some admit they’re also a little afraid of her.

That’s because Ocasio-Cortez threatens the status quo, bringing a youthful impatience to a set of policies popularized by Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign, like Medicare for All and tuition-free public college.

Thus making her a lot like Donald Trump: someone who has a following who scares more mainstream politicians of her party.

 

[lpetrich]

As a side note, FDIC doesn't protect a bank, it protects the depositors.

But according to George S's conception of freedom of fail, it is still guilty of depriving people of that freedom by guaranteeing their deposits.

Also, saying labor unions are bad because they deprive people of freedom of fail -- that smacks of desperation, because labor unions are private organizations, not government agencies, and according to "private sector good, public sector bad" ideology, labor unions are good.

 

[Ford]

As a side note, FDIC doesn't protect a bank, it protects the depositors.

But according to George S's conception of freedom of fail, it is still guilty of depriving people of that freedom by guaranteeing their deposits.

Also, saying labor unions are bad because they deprive people of freedom of fail -- that smacks of desperation, because labor unions are private organizations, not government agencies, and according to "private sector good, public sector bad" ideology, labor unions are good.

Ah, but you see, any time more than one person gets together to thwart unrestricted capitalism (like organized labor) that's "socialism" and is therefore bad. I mean, one minute a few people say "we should fight for better wages" and the next minute...boom! Venezuela!

 

[Horatio Parker]

As a side note, FDIC doesn't protect a bank, it protects the depositors.

But according to George S's conception of freedom of fail, it is still guilty of depriving people of that freedom by guaranteeing their deposits.

Also, saying labor unions are bad because they deprive people of freedom of fail -- that smacks of desperation, because labor unions are private organizations, not government agencies, and according to "private sector good, public sector bad" ideology, labor unions are good.

Medicine deprives people of the freedom to die...child rearing deprives (innocent) children of the freedom to grow up feral.

 

[Angry Floof]

As a side note, FDIC doesn't protect a bank, it protects the depositors.

But according to George S's conception of freedom of fail, it is still guilty of depriving people of that freedom by guaranteeing their deposits.

Also, saying labor unions are bad because they deprive people of freedom of fail -- that smacks of desperation, because labor unions are private organizations, not government agencies, and according to "private sector good, public sector bad" ideology, labor unions are good.

Medicine deprives people of the freedom to die...child rearing deprives (innocent) children of the freedom to grow up feral.

Education deprives people of the freedom to be dumb as doorknobs.

 

[lpetrich]

In important ways, she's the anti-Trump. Not just her age, sex, and ethnicity, but also her personality and career. She had a middle-class upbringing, first upper-middle-class, then lower-middle-class, and she distinguished herself in academia. By contrast, DT never got good grades, and he likely got his higher education just to get credentials. AOC had to work for her living, and her late father's connections got her nowhere. By contrast, DT has depended on his father's connections -- and his wealth -- and he could easily have lived a comfortable life being a trust-fund baby.

They differ in work ethic. AOC seems much more willing to do the work of her job than DT the work of his job. She doesn't spend much of her day in "Legislative Time", and she does not seem to have outsourced policymaking to Rachel Maddow, for instance.

On Ocasio-Cortez’s office bookshelf, near a picture of her late father and a photo of her with a local Girl Scout troop, two books nestle together in uneasy union. One is the Federalist papers, written mostly by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton and published in 1788. The other is The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, written by journalist David Wallace-Wells 231 years later. There’s a picture of Wonder Woman leaning in one corner of the office and a giant cardboard cutout of Cardi B’s face in another. On her desk are handwritten crib sheets for a February hearing. (“I’m going to be the bad guy,” she wrote in pencil.) More than 40 million people watched a subsequent NowThis News clip of her questioning a -government-accountability watchdog about campaign-finance laws.

She had a fairly comfortable middle-class life until her father died of lung cancer. She recalled the last time they talked. She didn't know that it was their last, but she claims that she could feel it.

"Ocasio-Cortez describes herself as a “dorky kid” who once asked for a micro-scope for her birthday." That's my kind of person.

Though she got a degree in economics and international relations from Boston University, she had to live paycheck to paycheck with whatever jobs she could find, and do so while saddled with a big student debt. "“We have an entire generation that is delaying or forgoing purchasing houses,” she says. “Our entire economy is slowing down due to the student-loan crisis.”" The reason that millennials are supposedly killing so many industries is because they cannot afford to support many of them.

She got into politics as an intern for Ted Kennedy, and she campaigned for Bernie Sanders. After Donald Trump won, she and some friends went to the Standing Rock protests, and she felt inspired by all these ordinary people standing up for themselves. As she was driving home, she got an unexpected phone call. Someone wanted her to run for Congress. Some former Bernie Sanders staffers had created a group called Brand New Congress, and its members were looking for people to support. AOC's brother nominated her, and the BNC people contacted her. AOC herself: “Everyone said, ‘She’s really cute, but maybe next time,’” about her long-shot candidacy.

More important, there was a shared sense among the young volunteers that they had been screwed. “We were all children of the recession,” say Waleed Shahid of Justice Democrats. “There’s an overwhelming sense that the economic and political system in our country is rigged.”

That’s why young Americans have become increasingly attracted to democratic socialism, which aims to build a stronger social safety net through democratic elections.

The Justice Democrats supported her, but they did not have much success elsewhere.

 

[Horatio Parker]

"“We have an entire generation that is delaying or forgoing purchasing houses,” she says. “Our entire economy is slowing down due to the student-loan crisis.”"

Yes. Debt deflation. Using real estate inflation to generate wealth didn't help either.

 

[lpetrich]

Some fellow first-term Democrats welcome the spotlight she brings. “We have this really dynamic rock star who is getting a lot of attention,” says Representative Haley Stevens of Michigan, a co-president of the freshman class. “Why is that a bad thing?” In person, Democratic sources say, Ocasio-Cortez is friendly and respectful, nothing like the firebrand who spars with -critics online. “She’s quiet as a mouse” in caucus meetings, says one congressional source.

Yet the attention she gets has also prompted plenty of grumbling from colleagues. “You could go a day without writing a story about AOC,” groused Representative Mark Pocan, a co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and a co-sponsor of the Green New Deal.

Some Democrats are concerned that Green New Deal provisions like a Federal jobs guarantee might not fly very well with many voters.

The old adage in Washington is that there are two types of members of Congress-: workhorses who revel in the details of legislating and constituent work, and show horses who crave the cameras. In interviews, a half dozen House Democratic aides described Ocasio-Cortez as the latter. (Her office says she attends more hearings than any of her colleagues.)

So she's both. I think that her diligent performance as a Congressional-hearing questioner has likely made a lot of her fellow politicians more accepting of her.

At the end of the article,

“I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually and semantically correct than about being morally right,” she told CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

As an activist, Ocasio-Cortez is used to focusing more on moral imperatives than on incremental policy wins. “I don’t think that we can compromise on transitioning to 100% renewable energy. We cannot compromise on saving our planet. We can’t compromise on saving kids,” she says. “We have to do these things. If we want to do them in different ways, that’s fine. But we can’t not do them.”

Over the last decade, I have gradually become more and more interested in renewable energy. I have watched wind-energy and solar-energy electricity generation have become more and more economically viable. IMO, AOC has the right idea, but her knowledge of renewable energy seems mostly theoretical. I haven't seen her go into the nitty-gritty of renewable-energy development, complete with a lot of knowledge of detail. But she seems like she could be capable of it.

 

[lpetrich]

Capitol Hill’s traditional emphasis on civility and compromise, she thinks, is merely a delay tactic. “There are always these folks that will say, ‘You’re not wrong, but …’” she says, rolling her eyes. “They avoid the political liability of disagreeing with you, but also they can stall you as much as possible to actually prevent the thing from happening.”

So evaluating Ocasio-Cortez’s success depends on the time frame in which she is judged. Will she help deliver Medicare for All and a Green New Deal in the next two years? No. But having the debate is already making a difference in how D.C. does business. “I used to be much more cynical about how much was up against us,” she says. “I think I’ve changed my mind. Because I think that change is a lot closer than we think.”

Arthur Schlesinger I and II have proposed that the United States alternates between liberal phases and conservative phases, reform phases and stagnation phases, public-purpose phases and private-interest phases, phases of expansion of democracy and phases of containment of democracy. Liberal phases end because reform efforts require a lot of effort to sustain, and because reforms may seem to go too far or else seem successful. Conservative phases end because society accumulates problems that society's elites are unwilling to address, if they accept the existence of those problems.

Lib: adoption of Constitution, Con: Hamilton era, Lib: Jefferson era, Con: after War of 1812, Lib: Jackson era, Con: dominance by slaveowners, Lib: Civil War, Reconstruction, Con: Gilded Age, Lib: Progressive Era, Con: Republican Restoration, Lib: New Deal, Con: Eisenhower Era, Lib: Sixties Radicalism, Con: Gilded Age II. The phases usually last around 16 years, give or take a few years, with the first Gilded Age lasting some 30 years. The current Gilded Age has lasted some 40 years with no end in sight. I thought that Bill Clinton's presidency might be the end of it, and then Barack Obama's. I was disappointed both times. Both of them wimped out. The Wisconsin Revolt was a failure, and BO did not do anything to help. The Occupy movement failed, and its participants never found any other meeting places. AOC has been good so far, and she has some friends in Congress. But I worry there also.

 

[lpetrich]

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "You know what’s amusing about this whole thing? Our leg staff (who help w Qs) *also* worked in restaurants, grew up in Appalachian trailer parks, and come from immigrant families. Wait until they find out I actually PAY them to do their jobs, coach them myself,& offer feedback.… https://t.co/79TaVASJbB" noting Media Matters on Twitter: "Fox & Friends on Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: "Somebody's writing her questions ... there is some forces behind her." "There has been some allegations she that was almost like the Manchurian Candidate" Transcript: [url]https://t.co/7S7qYegiP0 https://t.co/Ywfky5hWQv"[/url]
Like Ed Rollins calling her a "little girl", they may find it difficult to believe that she is doing the work of her office.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "Yes, and this is not just my story - this is true of wide swaths of our entire generation, who are now poised to become a much more influential civic + electoral bloc as we mature into our 30s & beyond.… https://t.co/noxdBkUoHF" noting Charlotte Alter on Twitter: "In order to understand @aoc, you have to look at what she experienced— and what she didn’t. Red Scare, Reaganomics & prosperous 90s were all before her time. Her adulthood was defined by financial crisis, debt & climate change. No wonder she and her peers are moving left"

She retweeted Waleed Shahid on Twitter: "The reason FOX News + Breitbart attack @AOC, @IlhanMN, @RashidaTlaib so much is because Rupert Murdoch and Robert Mercer want older, white voters to feel they have nothing in common with black & brown people who want to tax billionaires like them and provide health care to all." even as such voters say things like "Keep your government hands off my Medicare!"

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "Huge update: JP Morgan & Wells Fargo have announced that they will no longer fund private prisons. How did this happen? Through organizing people & public pressure! Everyday folks began paying attention to who was funding for-profit prisons & family separation,+ acted on it. … https://t.co/cY5no9xtnJ" noting Families Belong Together on Twitter: ".@JPMorgan @WellsFargo and @Chase are #BackersofHate: they finance detention centers that directly profit from detaining and separating migrant families. We support @AOC's efforts to hold these banks accountable and #DefundHate. https://t.co/3g89KBLAEk"
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "This is progress, and there is still work to do. There should not be a for-profit industry behind the detention and incarceration of human beings. The US locks up more people than anywhere else in the world, incl China. For-profit caging shouldn’t be legal in the first place."
Good. Private prisons also create unhealthy incentives, like mandating that their customer governments send them lots of prisoners.

 

[lpetrich]

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "This is a small-big thing, but shout out to TIME and Collier Schorr for getting my skin tone right in this photo. ️ It’s the little things that make a big difference, a lot of people see + appreciate it… https://t.co/RIMDNNy7QU" noting Jamil Smith on Twitter: "“An entire generation, which is now becoming one of the largest electorates in America, fame of age and never saw American prosperity,” @AOC told @CharlotteAlter. “I have never seen that, or experienced that, really, in my adult life.” @TIME’s new cover. https://t.co/5Wv0oMYorU"

AOC retweeted TIME on Twitter: "New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern addressed a Christchurch school that lost students to the mosque shootings [url]https://t.co/C1ebV5MxM0… https://t.co/GjId3Qqq4H"[/url]

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "When we choose NOT to establish healthcare as a right (including mental health!) it spills over + compounds the costs of homelessness, mass incarceration, & police confrontation. None of these issues would be as dire or costly if we prioritized mental health in policy + culture.… https://t.co/owly027THt" noting Madina Touré on Twitter: "“Calls to 911 reporting what the NYPD terms EDPs — ‘emotionally disturbed persons’ — have nearly doubled over the last decade, rising every year and in every precinct.” https://t.co/7BwGCRf61Z"

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "But his WhatsApp… " and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "(As always, shout out to CA’s Rep @RoKhanna for being so on point.)" noting CNN on Twitter: "Dem. @RepRoKhanna calls reports Kushner was using WhatsApp to communicate with foreign officials “ironic": Pres. Trump “ran his whole presidential campaign accusing Hillary Clinton of having a private server. ... Here you have something that’s much worse.” [url]https://t.co/gynmzazL6p… https://t.co/faEK8MyPgi"[/url]
WhatsApp home page

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "You know, instead of training children, teachers, houses of faith, & concertgoers to prep for being shot, we could just: -Pass Universal Background checks (#HR8!) -Disarm domestic abusers -Mandate safe storage -Ban bump stocks, semiautos, & high cap mags designed to kill people… https://t.co/BMVi9wDRDI"

 

[Derec]

Though she got a degree in economics

... her understanding of economics is, ironically, dismal.

and international relations from Boston University, she had to live paycheck to paycheck with whatever jobs she could find,

I wonder why that is. If she really graduated cum laude with a dual degree, why did she have such a hard time finding a proper job? Is it because a real job would not have allowed her to do things like gallivant around North Dakota tilting against pipelines?

and do so while saddled with a big student debt. "“We have an entire generation that is delaying or forgoing purchasing houses,” she says. “Our entire economy is slowing down due to the student-loan crisis.”" The reason that millennials are supposedly killing so many industries is because they cannot afford to support many of them.

Her student loans were largely her choice. She chose an expensive private university when she could have studied economics at SUNY for much less.

She got into politics as an intern for Ted Kennedy, and she campaigned for Bernie Sanders.

That would have been around 2008 most likely when she was freshman at BU.

After Donald Trump won, she and some friends went to the Standing Rock protests, and she felt inspired by all these ordinary people standing up for themselves.

They were not "standing up for themselves", they tried to prevent a rather safe pipeline being laid based on a bunch of lies promulgated by extremists. By the way, how much gasoline did AOC waste flying/driving to Standing Rock?

That’s why young Americans have become increasingly attracted to democratic socialism, which aims to build a stronger social safety net through democratic elections.

Not to mention seize the means of production.

The Justice Democrats supported her, but they did not have much success elsewhere.

And now they've dropped her.

 

[angelo]

We have a damn sight more to fear from creeping oligarchy -- which isn't creeping any more, it's in full gallop.

Absolutely. Both ideas are big government. We need to reduce government power. I don't know how -- it is firmly entrenched.

We should start by abolishing mandatory vaccinations. They remove the freedom of people to fail at fending off infection while spreading it across the population. That should help with the oligarchy problem. Next should be traffic lights, as they remove my freedom to fail to avoid plowing into a family of four as they cross the street.

We should also abolish the right to own property, confiscate all bank accounts above a certain amount, legislate to seize company profits, nationalise banks and all sources of profit producing means, right?

 

[angelo]

Why are people so afraid of ideas?

I Doubt too many people are afraid of good sensible and rational ideas. What I suspect they're afraid of, are the looney tunes ideas coming from the likes of AOC, Sanders and their ilk.

 

[lpetrich]

Progressive group disputes right-wing report that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was quietly booted from its board - New York Daily News

The Justice Democrats, a left-wing advocacy group that helped engineer Ocasio-Cortez’s midterm primary victory, flatly denied a Daily Caller report that the Bronx-born congresswoman was first removed from its board on Friday.

“There’s no real story here,” a spokesman for the group told the Daily News, adding that Ocasio-Cortez actually resigned from its board on June 30, 2018 — four days after her upset victory against longtime New York Rep. Joe Crowley.

Alexandra Rojas Interview — Who Is Alexandra Rojas, the Executive Director at Justice Democrats? - "Meet Alexandra Rojas, the Executive Director of Justice Democrats Who Helped Elect Your Favorite Congresswomen" - including AOC herself

The group endorsed a number of the freshman congresswomen who have been dominating the current news cycle with their progressive platforms, including Rep. Rashida Tlaib, Rep. Ayanna Pressley, and Rep. Ilhan Omar. The group supports candidates who swear off corporate PAC money and espouse Medicare for all, the Green New Deal, and abolishing ICE, the very platforms that have now become part of our national conversation and essential talking points in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary.

Then an interview with AR, including

How do you respond to people who have critiqued Justice Democrats’ strategy of challenging incumbents in 2020, instead of focusing on keeping the majority and winning the Senate?

With that logic, America would never know Ocasio-Cortez or Pressley. There’s tons of resources going into keeping the majority and winning the Senate, and we obviously support Democrats winning the White House and seats in the Senate and House. But when we ran Ocasio-Cortez against Joe Crowley, everyone told us, why are you doing that? Shouldn’t we focus on Trump? Over 70 percent of congressional districts in America are uncompetitive in the general, and lots of the people in those deep blue districts are not getting the kind of progressive representation they deserve, just as was the case with Ocasio-Cortez.

The Democratic President is only going to be as progressive as however progressive their Congress is. We saw that in 2009 when Democrats gave up on the public option. We need to build a mission-driven caucus in Congress who will hold whoever is in charge accountable to the best the Democratic Party can be.

I think that that is a VERY good point. The Left seems to focus on winning the Presidency too much, and to neglect all the other offices that must be filled.

Let's talk more about this "moment." These candidates that Justice Democrats endorsed are dominating the news. Are you surprised?

People like Alexandria and myself are just the millennial generation. We are part of the first generation that is going to be worse off than our parents are.

Which is why we get these news stories about all the industries that Millennials are killing.

I saw you tweeted when Sanders announced his 2020 candidacy that he helped you believe in, what you called, a “political revolution.”

I think we're in the middle of one right now.

AOC herself had campaigned for BS.

 

[lpetrich]

FACT CHECK: Is U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez an Actress Playing a Congresswoman?

In March 2019, our inbox started to fill with queries from readers who had heard that U. S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was an “actress” who was playing the role of congresswoman in order to further the agenda of a political group. These questions were based on a popular video entitled “The Brains Behind AOC Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez” by YouTube user “Mr. Reagan.”

The video, which can be viewed at the end of this article, hits on a number of issues in its 23 minutes, but the essential argument is that Ocasio-Cortez was “cast” by the group Justice Democrats into the “role” of congresswoman, and that she is merely a figurehead (or “puppet congresswoman”) pushing the group’s agenda.

Snopes: "False". What the Justice Democrats did was typical of PAC's.

How Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal is being built | Grist

By connecting climate action to more tangible issues like wages and health care, New Consensus also hopes to create a national strategy that everyone can get behind — and benefit from. Try explaining the importance of installing more solar panels to a single mother who can’t get childcare, Gunn-Wright said. Illuminating the connection between quality of life and climate action is how they’ll get everyone on board.

“For so long, we have talked about the climate in an abstract, global way — we talk about a reduction in emissions or we talk about keeping the global temperature from rising a particular number of degrees,” she said. “The way that climate change affects people is on a personal level.”

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Ocasio-Cortez must be Presidency bound to get this level of attack and paranoia.

Funny how on one hand, they say she is an idiot, but on the other they say she is too smart, both an indication of inadequacy.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Why are the unvaccinated kids not also innocent?

People who vaccinate their children are unaffected by unvaccinated kids. Most unvaccinated kids are protected by the halo effect -- everyone around them is (usually) vaccinated.
I encourage all parents to vaccinate their children. They have the right to be a bad parent in this regard.
Can children be protected from this bad parenting? Yes. Mostly. Just have a PSA about particular unvaccinated children who have died. Anecdotes are persuasive. As long as it is above 85% the halo effect will protect almost all of the unvaccinated.

Yup, that's why we've seen these outbreaks, because herd immunity protects us, expect when the herd in any particular situation isn't vaccinated enough.

 

[Angry Floof]

Why are people so afraid of ideas?

I Doubt too many people are afraid of good sensible and rational ideas. What I suspect they're afraid of, are the looney tunes ideas coming from the likes of AOC, Sanders and their ilk.

The way you act out so dramatically to AOC and Sanders shows the animal brain fear aggression that underlies right wing authoritarianism.

 

[Mediancat]

Note that the vaccination discussion has been split off to a thread in Natural Science.

Thank you.

Rob