Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "Yesterday I offered an amendment to allow Fed researchers to study Schedule I Drugs, incl: - MDMA & PTSD - Psilocybin & severe depression - Ibogaine & opioid withdrawal ?????? House votes TODAY. If you’re supportive, CALL YOUR REP. Don’t assume they’ll vote for it - let them know. https://t.co/NrVoxKQa2X" / Twitter noting Tom Angell ???????????? on Twitter: "WATCH: Congress debated @AOC’s amendment to remove barriers to researching Schedule I drugs like like psilocybin, MDMA and marijuana early this morning. A vote is coming later today… [url]https://t.co/RCWqYxMlhV https://t.co/KfZNjHyfGw" / Twitter[/url] noting House Rejects AOC Amendment To Make It Easier To Study Psychedelic Drugs | Marijuana Moment

“I’m a strong believer in evidence-based policymaking,” Ocasio-Cortez said during the floor debate. “And wherever there is evidence of good, we have a moral obligation to pursue and explore the parameters of that good. Even if it means challenging our past assumptions or admitting past wrongs.”

Describing the current situation researchers face as a “catch-22,” she said that the problem with the current policy is that it is “so vague and broadly interrupted that it prevents scientists from researching, examining and exploring avenues of treatment that could alleviate an enormous amount of suffering from medical conditions.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "During debate, the arguments against it didn’t make much sense. Some were outright false: - legal argument (to take it off Schedule I to study it) doesn’t make sense - we scientific evidence to help do that! - bunch of claims about marijuana - w/o study, claims are unsupported!" / Twitter
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "This bill has bipartisan support, but it also has bipartisan opposition. Many Dem & GOP alike, are uncomfortable w/ letting federal researchers merely *study* the clinical promise of certain drugs - even in veteran PTSD. Your call can help them see a shift in public sentiment." / Twitter

She sounds completely rational to me: "evidence-based policymaking."

 

[lpetrich]

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "Sadly our drug research amendment failed today, but I’m undeterred. I’m proud we were even able to bring a vote on psychedelic research to the House floor. 30% of veterans have considered suicide. These drugs show extreme promise in treating PTSD + more. Let’s keep at it. https://t.co/Hf6bsN7ws4" / Twitter noting Nick Wing on Twitter: "The emerging research on these substances is fascinating and potentially revolutionary. There is simply no good argument for continuing to stifle the effort to learn more about how they could help people. https://t.co/m6lBYOT0md" / Twitter
One shouldn't oversell such drugs. Developing good therapies takes a lot of trial and error, and a lot of possibilities may not work out very well. But just the same, the psychoactivity of these drugs does suggest usefulness in treating some psychiatric conditions.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "The good news: one of my amendments DID pass w/ bipartisan support: funding treatment for opioid-related infectious diseases. Our leg that did pass will help many Americans struck by the opioid crisis, and the one that didn’t lays the groundwork for future breakthroughs. " / Twitter
The less drug warring the better.

 

[angelo]

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "Yesterday I offered an amendment to allow Fed researchers to study Schedule I Drugs, incl: - MDMA & PTSD - Psilocybin & severe depression - Ibogaine & opioid withdrawal ������ House votes TODAY. If you’re supportive, CALL YOUR REP. Don’t assume they’ll vote for it - let them know. https://t.co/NrVoxKQa2X" / Twitter noting Tom Angell ������������ on Twitter: "WATCH: Congress debated @AOC’s amendment to remove barriers to researching Schedule I drugs like like psilocybin, MDMA and marijuana early this morning. A vote is coming later today… [url]https://t.co/RCWqYxMlhV https://t.co/KfZNjHyfGw" / Twitter[/url] noting House Rejects AOC Amendment To Make It Easier To Study Psychedelic Drugs | Marijuana Moment

“I’m a strong believer in evidence-based policymaking,” Ocasio-Cortez said during the floor debate. “And wherever there is evidence of good, we have a moral obligation to pursue and explore the parameters of that good. Even if it means challenging our past assumptions or admitting past wrongs.”

Describing the current situation researchers face as a “catch-22,” she said that the problem with the current policy is that it is “so vague and broadly interrupted that it prevents scientists from researching, examining and exploring avenues of treatment that could alleviate an enormous amount of suffering from medical conditions.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "During debate, the arguments against it didn’t make much sense. Some were outright false: - legal argument (to take it off Schedule I to study it) doesn’t make sense - we scientific evidence to help do that! - bunch of claims about marijuana - w/o study, claims are unsupported!" / Twitter
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "This bill has bipartisan support, but it also has bipartisan opposition. Many Dem & GOP alike, are uncomfortable w/ letting federal researchers merely *study* the clinical promise of certain drugs - even in veteran PTSD. Your call can help them see a shift in public sentiment." / Twitter

She sounds completely rational to me: "evidence-based policymaking."

The Green New Deal sounds rational to you?

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

https://newrepublic.com/article/153966/fear-loathing-green-new-deal

One of the less-appreciated wonders of the Green New Deal—the proposal for large-scale federal investment in alternative energy sources introduced in February by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Edward Markey—is that it presses almost all the buttons of the right at once. It’s the brainchild of a woman (a young Latina at that). It conjures up the ambitious, habit-altering agendas of radical environmentalists—and if this wasn’t bad enough, it reaches all the way back to the original modern program of radical reform, the New Deal! Identity politics, the New Left, the Old Left: For eager right-wing merchants of ideological invective, the Green New Deal has it all.

Precisely because it seems to embody so many of the right’s worst fears, the response to the Green New Deal provides us with a catalogue of conservative arguments in all their schizophrenic glory. Post after tweet after editorial oscillates madly between a depiction of the Green New Deal as sheer folly, a laughable and frivolous exercise in ultraliberal vanity, barely worthy of analysis—and a portrayal of savvy, power-crazed environmentalists rubbing their hands with glee....

...

And here the past serves as an instructive prologue; we’ve seen pretty much this same furor over imperiled liberty and hovering tyranny in the concerted bid from some business leaders to stigmatize and delegitimize the original New Deal. Right-wing foes of the 1930s program of social and economic reform hailed each newly arrived New Deal initiative as the harbinger of social revolution—when, that is, they weren’t wringing their hands over its “ravenous madness” (as one American Liberty League pamphlet put it) or warning against the tentacles of bureaucracy strangling a once-free land. What we view today as barely controversial registered then as a series of seismic shocks to the entire social order.

...

But Wall Street conspicuously dissented. The investment economy’s opposition focused on two main points: Wall Street savants predicted that the Securities Act would slow economic recovery and thus prolong the depression; and they painted a dire portrait of a bureaucratic state gone mad, seeking ever-greater control and power. At first, it seemed that Wall Street would accept the new law, if warily. Even though “the underlying principle of Federal control of business is as repugnant as ever,” the New York Times wrote, “most industries and business executives are resignedly falling in with the purposes of the two-year experiment which Congress has been asked to authorize.” But this grudging toleration for regulation quickly gave way to resentment. A 14,000-word article in Fortune magazine in August 1933 (by lawyer Arthur H. Dean of the New York firm of Sullivan & Cromwell) warned that the act “contains many provisions not apparent on the first reading which will have a profound effect on the entire economic system of the country.” What’s more, Dean continued, the measure was “drastically deflationary” and “may seriously retard economic recovery.”

...

Much of the hostility toward the Green New Deal is difficult to separate from the right’s obsessive denigration of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—referred to affectionately by Glenn Beck and others as “Alexandria Occasional Cortex.” Commenters over at Free Republic describe her as a self-absorbed “bimbo” and a “very slow learner.” There’s an attitude of disbelief that this young woman could possibly be in Congress at all, let alone proposing something as ambitious as a Green New Deal. The apotheosis of this demonization campaign is the notion—put forward in an online video that has been promoted by Fox News host Sean Hannity among others—that Ocasio-Cortez is a puppet entirely controlled by the Justice Democrats, a caucus they portray as a Leninist vanguard of power-mad state planning. Ocasio-Cortez is, in this dark surmise, “not really the Congresswoman from New York’s 14th Congressional District. She is—essentially—an actress, she’s merely playing the part of a New York Congresswoman.” AOC is at once a virago drunk on her own self-aggrandizement and an incompetent ditz; the people who support her are dupes, idiots, or both.

In some ways, these critiques themselves echo the dismissive contempt many conservatives famously held for FDR; the president was often characterized as an intellectual lightweight (“a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would like very much to be president,” journalist Walter Lippmann, a founding editor of The New Republic, wrote in 1932). Occasionally, they depicted FDR as a cripple who had no business running for national office (these criticisms were more whispered while he was on the campaign trail than publicly lobbed at the exceedingly popular president). Both in the 1930s and today, such personal attacks become a way of diminishing the program while also implicitly undermining a demos foolish enough to have chosen such a fraudulent leader.

The more sophisticated critiques of the Green New Deal follow a rhetorical structure that Hirschman surely would have recognized from earlier campaigns against universal suffrage and the welfare state. Whatever the proponents of the Green New Deal may intend, such critics lament, their plans will actually lead to the exact opposite outcome. Writers at the American Enterprise Institute have argued that the Green New Deal will “unintentionally inhibit” investment in clean technology by encouraging companies to sign up for government contracts rather than invest in research and development to develop low-carbon machines. They have insisted that what looks like environmental legislation is in fact the opposite: “To achieve ‘Green New Socialism’ we would have to trash all existing environmental laws,” writes Mark Perry on the American Enterprise Institute’s Carpe Diem blog. Building renewable energy sources would mean abandoning habitat protections and other longstanding environmental laws—jeopardizing the natural landscape in return for preserving the social one, argues Myron Ebell over at the website of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Much the same set of unintended-cum-ironic consequences are sure to attend the Green New Deal’s specific provisions for economic reform. In the telling of its critics, the Green New Deal’s stated attempts to address economic inequality would only lead to the further entrenchment of crony capitalism and the impoverishment of the working-class people it purports to help.

...

In a way, the public relations barrage is not at all surprising. After all, for many years, the entire public debate about climate change has been hamstrung by the wealth and political power of the fossil fuel industry. The top 25 oil and gas companies alone produced $73 billion in profits in 2017. Industries tied to fossil fuels spent nearly $2 billion in lobbying between 2000 and 2016, according to a report from the Public Accountability Initiative. As Kate Aronoff put it at The Intercept, the result has been that significant parts of the Republican political establishment recycle fuzzy science and insist that climate change is no more than a hoax, a socialist plot or some other variety of wild-eyed conspiratorial maneuver; meanwhile, those liberal politicians who admit the reality of the problem have entirely failed to generate any political energy for actually addressing it. As the Sunrise Movement has pointed out, many of these political leaders, too, routinely collect financial contributions from the fossil fuel industry.

No one objects to debate and analysis (though this is not quite the same as derisive laughter), and there’s clearly much that remains uncertain about the Green New Deal. But it’s hard to escape the sense that it has elicited such a strong response precisely because it represents the first effort to shake off the complacency and timidity that have for far too long marked the mainstream response to climate change. It’s the first attempt to mount a response to the emergency that treats it as an emergency. Here, too, looking back to the New Deal may be helpful. The 1930s businessmen and newspaper editors who assailed the first New Deal were in many cases alarmists, and in some instances, flat-out paranoid. The 1933 Securities Act was not, after all, the first step on the road to serfdom.

But in one key sense, they were on to something. In marshaling broad-based opposition to the first New Deal, they helped popularize the ideas of the business executives who joined the Liberty League or financed the Republicans in 1936 or resisted labor unions in the 1930s and again after World War II. And it’s true that, taken together, the measures of the New Deal did actually entail a significant transfer of political power and social resources away from the elite—a partial and limited one, but a substantive one nonetheless.

The same will be true of any meaningful proposal to cope with climate change. This is not a problem that can be confronted in a technocratic way that avoids all redistribution of resources; in its essence, it suggests that certain social goods are more important than an individual’s right to consume whatever he or she wants to with no regard for the consequences, or a company’s right to profit above all else. As such, it’s going to meet with tremendous resistance, and it will take an enormous show of political will to overcome it.

...

I recommend the entire article.

 

[lpetrich]

Titled link: Fear and Loathing of the Green New Deal | The New Republic

AOC retweeted Rep. Pramila Jayapal on Twitter: "I have never spoken publicly about my abortion. I'm speaking now because of intensified efforts to strip Constitutional rights from pregnant people and to criminalize abortion. I shared my story in an Op-Ed with @nytimes. https://t.co/AjBxRLtBet" / Twitter

Lakota Law Project on Twitter: "We were honored to join Pres. Bear Runner @OglalaOyate to meet with @AOC re: #ClimateCrisis, #GreenNewDeal & #NoKXL. Act now to stop this pipeline & protect the Ogallala Aquifer: [url]https://t.co/WSSEDwTfQ9 https://t.co/ifl2DRjQCj" / Twitter[/url] - AOC showed up and she described how taking part in the Standing Rock protests was a "spiritual transformation" for her. Ordinary people taking part in political activism eventually inspired her to get into politics.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "I’ve spoken previously about our office’s parental leave policy (12 weeks paid leave to ALL new parents - dads included). In the first 6 months of my term, two of my staff had babies and one more is expecting. Here’s how we’ve worked things out so far: https://t.co/9RuVvNa70n" / Twitter noting How Ocasio-Cortez Makes an 'Unusual' Parental Leave Policy Work

Some of the Twitter comments I found amusing, like objecting that it is *their* money being used to pay for her staffers' family leaves.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Considering Palin is 15 times stupider that AOC...

At least Palin was once the governor of Alaska, which refutes your 15 times stupider than AOC statement, who truly is an airhead who hasn't a clue! Now, had you said both AOC and Palin are equally as stupid, it would be more credible.

Palin couldn't hack that job and quit. Her governorship, such as it was, was not very successful and riddled with corruption and incompetence.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

https://newrepublic.com/article/153966/fear-loathing-green-new-deal

I recommend the entire article.

That seems to be ignoring the deep problems with the green new deal.

There's a simple showstopper in it: We do not have practical storage technology even on the drawing boards. To attempt to deploy something nationwide in 12 years is folly. There might be good parts of it but when your centerpiece has an obvious showstopper you aren't credible.

 

[Derec]

Titled link: Fear and Loathing of the Green New Deal | The New Republic

Horrible article.
It's basically trying to argue that GND is great because 1) "right-wingers" are against it, ain't it funny 2) New Deal was criticized too, so GND will work out just like New Deal, just watch and 3) moderate liberals criticize it, so it must be good.
It no part of the article does the author actually defend any of the proposals of GND or address the substance of any of the criticism.

Lakota Law Project on Twitter: "We were honored to join Pres. Bear Runner @OglalaOyate to meet with @AOC re: #ClimateCrisis, #GreenNewDeal & #NoKXL. Act now to stop this pipeline & protect the Ogallala Aquifer: [url]https://t.co/WSSEDwTfQ9 https://t.co/ifl2DRjQCj" / Twitter[/url] - AOC showed up and she described how taking part in the Standing Rock protests was a "spiritual transformation" for her. Ordinary people taking part in political activism eventually inspired her to get into politics.

We have discussed at length the nonsensical protests at Standing Rock. The whole premise behind the protests was built on falsehoods, both regarding Indian land (it doesn't go through the reservation) and risk to the Mississippi water (it is negligible). The protests were also counterproductive because people ended up driving 1000 or 2000 miles (and some flew in as well, from as far away as Hawaii) with gas or diesel burning vehicles just to protest transport of oil. The idiocy of the protest is perhaps best summed up with this photo:

I am certainly not surprised that this is what inspired Occasional Cortex to go into politics ...

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Titled link: Fear and Loathing of the Green New Deal | The New Republic

Horrible article.
It's basically trying to argue that GND is great because 1) "right-wingers" are against it, ain't it funny 2) New Deal was criticized too, so GND will work out just like New Deal, just watch and 3) moderate liberals criticize it, so it must be good.
It no part of the article does the author actually defend any of the proposals of GND or address the substance of any of the criticism.

Lakota Law Project on Twitter: "We were honored to join Pres. Bear Runner @OglalaOyate to meet with @AOC re: #ClimateCrisis, #GreenNewDeal & #NoKXL. Act now to stop this pipeline & protect the Ogallala Aquifer: [url]https://t.co/WSSEDwTfQ9 https://t.co/ifl2DRjQCj" / Twitter[/url] - AOC showed up and she described how taking part in the Standing Rock protests was a "spiritual transformation" for her. Ordinary people taking part in political activism eventually inspired her to get into politics.

We have discussed at length the nonsensical protests at Standing Rock. The whole premise behind the protests was built on falsehoods, both regarding Indian land (it doesn't go through the reservation) and risk to the Mississippi water (it is negligible). The protests were also counterproductive because people ended up driving 1000 or 2000 miles (and some flew in as well, from as far away as Hawaii) with gas or diesel burning vehicles just to protest transport of oil. The idiocy of the protest is perhaps best summed up with this photo:

I am certainly not surprised that this is what inspired Occasional Cortex to go into politics ...

No. The article doesn't evaluate the GND, just the reichwing morons. Nice try, though.

 

[Derec]

No. The article doesn't evaluate the GND,

Well, why doesn't it?

just the reichwing morons. Nice try, though.

"Evaluate" would be too generous a verb. It exhibits the same level of thinking as using slurs like "reichwing" and "morons" does.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

No. The article doesn't evaluate the GND,

Well, why doesn't it?

just the reichwing morons. Nice try, though.

"Evaluate" would be too generous a verb. It exhibits the same level of thinking as using slurs like "reichwing" and "morons" does.

Right because you didn't fucking post pictures of AOC in the thread and call her ugly. No one's buying your hypocritical arguments, Derec.

 

[lpetrich]

All Out Crazy
America's Overexposed Communist

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: " Can you pass these bills / For affordable birth control pills / If they don’t want to- / Then the GOP is through - Bills by Congressional Destiny’s Child cc @AyannaPressley https://t.co/XdfJvI1wSc" / Twitter noting The Hill on Twitter: "Ayanna Pressley says she, Ocasio-Cortez and group of congresswomen make up the 'Destiny's Child' of birth control [url]https://t.co/zk36ddtjES https://t.co/bk3NSR9ojC" / Twitter[/url] noting Ayanna Pressley says she, Ocasio-Cortez and group of congresswomen make up the 'Destiny's Child' of birth control | TheHill
Senator Patty Murray on Twitter: " Hi @SenTedCruz. @AyannaPressley is exactly right. We'd all love to have your support for accessible *AND* affordable OTC birth control. Will get you the details. https://t.co/J0zEGUWOwD" / Twitter noting Ayanna Pressley on Twitter: "Hi there @tedcruz hit up our girl @pattymurray she and I have already written the bill, album dropping tomorrow @AOC's vocals (& original co sponsorship) = on point. @KatieHill4CA’s an original too. Just call it the Destiny's Child of OTC birth control https://t.co/Ri2q1Viez4" / Twitter noting Ted Cruz on Twitter: "I agree. Perhaps, in addition to the legislation we are already working on together to ban Members of Congress from becoming lobbyists, we can team up here as well. A simple, clean bill making birth control available over the counter. Interested? https://t.co/7kh3kqxN1w" / Twitter
 Destiny's Child - how Beyoncé got started.

 

[lpetrich]

Rewire.News on Twitter: "Yesterday, @AyannaPressley, @AOC and @PattyMurray introduced a measure that would bring us one step closer to affordable, insurance-covered, over-the-counter birth control, preventing a scenario where the medication is easier to get but harder to pay for. https://t.co/cv0Y3p61BC" / Twitter

Rashida Tlaib on Twitter: ""Patriots defend the Constitution, not a President."-- a sign at the #ImpeachTrumpNow Rally in #13thDistrictStrong #HomelandSecuritySquad t-shirt @AyannaPressley @AOC https://t.co/N9HZFk3k65" / Twitter
Rep. Andy Levin on Twitter: "When I became a member of the 116th Congress, I took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. Today, I announce that I have concluded that the House has a duty to open an impeachment inquiry into the conduct of President Donald J. Trump." / Twitter
Kyle Griffin on Twitter: ".@AOC on impeachment: "This is about us doing our jobs, and if we're talking about what's going to be a victory for Trump and what's not going to be a victory for Trump, then we are politicizing and we are tainting this process, which, again should be removed from politics." https://t.co/0kc9e73qVF" / Twitter

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "We need to talk about healthcare of incarcerated women + people. Federal statutes prevent funding reproductive healthcare in prisons. That’s wrong. The moment we exempt some, we threaten healthcare for us all. Let’s repeal Hyde & end our inhumane system of mass incarceration. https://t.co/aXohIPU84G" / Twitter noting ABC News Politics on Twitter: ".@AOC tells @jonkarl she is "excited to be introducing a repeal of the Hyde Amendment via amendment" for incarcerated women. "The maternal and reproductive health care of incarcerated women ... should be guaranteed as with all women in the United States" [url]https://t.co/M3GutNefQP https://t.co/34OYjXyBwg" / Twitter[/url]

Justice Democrats on Twitter: ""I think that we have a very real risk of losing the presidency to Donald Trump if we do not have a presidential candidate that is fighting for true transformational change in the lives of working people in the United States.” -@AOC https://t.co/UmSyp2HhF0" / Twitter
Like someone who wants to increase workers wages without supporting a $15/hr minimum wage, and other such unconvincing half-measures.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Excited to work with Ted Cruz - POLITICO

Speaking on ABC News' "This Week," the New York Democrat said her team has been in communication with the Texas Republican's, though the two lawmakers have not yet met in person. The two high-profile lawmakers surprised many of their colleagues when they came together on Twitter to address some issues, from birth control to banning lawmakers from later becoming lobbyists.

"We have an ongoing working relationship and I'm extraordinarily excited in seeing what we can accomplish," Ocasio-Cortez said Sunday.

"I never thought I'd say it," she added, laughing.

 

[lpetrich]

Police say man trespassed into Ocasio-Cortez's office, sprayed fire extinguisher | TheHill

Trump cites Ocasio-Cortez to defend himself against impeachment | TheHill
Donald J. Trump on Twitter: "Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “I think we have a very real risk of losing the Presidency to Donald Trump.” I agree, and that is the only reason they play the impeach card, which cannot be legally used!" / Twitter

In the same interview, the freshman representative said the "every day that passes, the pressure to impeach grows, and I think that it's justifiable."

"Ten counts of obstruction of justice, four with rock solid evidence. We have violations of the emoluments clause. We need to at least open an inquiry so that we can look at what is going on, and that is what opening an impeachment inquiry means," she said. "Holding this president (to) account is holding all of government to account."

 

[lpetrich]

Ocasio-Cortez nails it - Blogs - Talk Freethought by Underseer notes Ocasio-Cortez Exposes Lindsey Graham & Seb Gorka's Immorality - YouTube
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "Asking to be considered a refugee & applying for status isn’t a crime. It wasn’t for Jewish families fleeing Germany. It wasn’t for targeted families fleeing Rwanda. It wasn’t for communities fleeing war-torn Syria. And it isn’t for those fleeing violence in Central America. https://t.co/qhv7Rr1itn" / Twitter noting NBC News on Twitter: "A migrant family, part of a caravan of thousands traveling from Central America en route to the United States, runs away from tear gas in front of the U.S.-Mexico border wall in Tijuana, Mexico. (: Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters) https://t.co/pz7hkxsN9g" / Twitter

Sebastian Gorka DrG on Twitter: "Your comparison @Ocasio2018 is disgraceful. There is no genocide occurring South of our border targeting millions for death or shipping whole families to labor camps for extermination. You truly are an insult to intelligent and empathic humans everywhere. https://t.co/aYUCuuIsQo" / Twitter
Lindsey Graham on Twitter: "I recommend she take a tour of the Holocaust Museum in DC. Might help her better understand the differences between the Holocaust and the caravan in Tijuana. https://t.co/05vCexiClE" / Twitter

Auschwitz Memorial on Twitter: "When we look at Auschwitz we see the end of the process. It's important to remember that the Holocaust actually did not start from gas chambers. This hatred gradually developed from words, stereotypes & prejudice through legal exclusion, dehumanisation & escalating violence." / Twitter

To Seb Gorka:
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "You were forced out of the Trump Admin for saying white supremacists were “not the problem” days before Neo-Nazis in Charlottesville killed 3 people. Pretty sure we’re on the right side of history if you’re my opposition. This is not about atrocity. It’s about how we get there. https://t.co/vJJvrpp5SA" / Twitter
To Lindsey Graham:
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: ".@LindseyGrahamSC, the point of such a treasured museum is to bring its lessons to present day. This administration has jailed children and violated human rights. Perhaps we should stop pretending that authoritarianism + violence is a historical event instead of a growing force. https://t.co/aGJMrPTqNT" / Twitter
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "While we’re recommending museums @LindseyGrahamSC, I heard your “joke” about ethnic DNA preferences last month. Perhaps you would enjoy a visit (or revisit) to the Smithsonian Museum of African-American History and Culture (@NMAAHC). It’s a great educational experience." / Twitter

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "What if instead of sending 5k troops to the border, we had sent 5k caseworkers to review + process visa applications? In addition to averting moral crisis, it also would‘ve saved enormous amt of resources. But we don’t talk about the financial recklessness of GOP admins, do we?" / Twitter

Ocasio-Cortez Makes Cuomo Look Dumb For 'How Do You Pay' Question - YouTube

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "“But how are we going to pay for the Space Force?” Oh wait sorry - we only ask that when it comes to healthcare, education, and saving the planet. https://t.co/J4Z1QVrDue" / Twitter

 

[lpetrich]

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "Just so we’re clear. Things we FIND money to pay for: $2T in tax cuts for billionaires $210 Billion Trade War $XX? Space Force (who cares how much, right?) Things We Refuse to Pay for: Just Recovery for Puerto Rico Medicare for All Tuition-Free College" / Twitter

Futurist Amy Webb on AOC’s video “A Message From the Future.”
Amy Webb described it as a scenario.

There are three types of scenarios. Usually you have a question or a central topic. There are optimistic framings, which is what AOC wrote. I think it’s a great example of an optimistic scenario, which is not: “The world is a happy, rosy, lovely, wonderful place.” It’s more like, “Given what we know to be true today, we made the best possible decisions that we could, and therefore we had the best possible outcomes.” A neutral framing is preserving the status quo. And a pessimistic or catastrophic framing is seeing the data and making terrible choices.

The best scenarios are plausible. That’s what distinguishes a scenario from sci-fi. And so in [AOC’s] case, what she wrote is not speculative fiction or sci-fi. It’s more representative of a traditional scenario because it is plausible and it’s based in data.

It may all be present-day technology, but IMO it is still a form of speculative fiction.

n the last two minutes of the video, she created a very effective, plausible preferred scenario for the future. That’s a great tool. Rather than people arguing about climate change, she’s telling a story, she’s got a lot of detail, she’s done some world-building. All of those elements are what should be there for a scenario. Most of what leads up to that is a history of how we got to that point.

It has more feeling and it is less wonky than a similar scenario in With a Green New Deal, Here’s What the World Could Look Like for the Next Generation

 

[angelo]

https://newrepublic.com/article/153966/fear-loathing-green-new-deal

One of the less-appreciated wonders of the Green New Deal—the proposal for large-scale federal investment in alternative energy sources introduced in February by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Edward Markey—is that it presses almost all the buttons of the right at once. It’s the brainchild of a woman (a young Latina at that). It conjures up the ambitious, habit-altering agendas of radical environmentalists—and if this wasn’t bad enough, it reaches all the way back to the original modern program of radical reform, the New Deal! Identity politics, the New Left, the Old Left: For eager right-wing merchants of ideological invective, the Green New Deal has it all.

Precisely because it seems to embody so many of the right’s worst fears, the response to the Green New Deal provides us with a catalogue of conservative arguments in all their schizophrenic glory. Post after tweet after editorial oscillates madly between a depiction of the Green New Deal as sheer folly, a laughable and frivolous exercise in ultraliberal vanity, barely worthy of analysis—and a portrayal of savvy, power-crazed environmentalists rubbing their hands with glee....

...

And here the past serves as an instructive prologue; we’ve seen pretty much this same furor over imperiled liberty and hovering tyranny in the concerted bid from some business leaders to stigmatize and delegitimize the original New Deal. Right-wing foes of the 1930s program of social and economic reform hailed each newly arrived New Deal initiative as the harbinger of social revolution—when, that is, they weren’t wringing their hands over its “ravenous madness” (as one American Liberty League pamphlet put it) or warning against the tentacles of bureaucracy strangling a once-free land. What we view today as barely controversial registered then as a series of seismic shocks to the entire social order.

...

But Wall Street conspicuously dissented. The investment economy’s opposition focused on two main points: Wall Street savants predicted that the Securities Act would slow economic recovery and thus prolong the depression; and they painted a dire portrait of a bureaucratic state gone mad, seeking ever-greater control and power. At first, it seemed that Wall Street would accept the new law, if warily. Even though “the underlying principle of Federal control of business is as repugnant as ever,” the New York Times wrote, “most industries and business executives are resignedly falling in with the purposes of the two-year experiment which Congress has been asked to authorize.” But this grudging toleration for regulation quickly gave way to resentment. A 14,000-word article in Fortune magazine in August 1933 (by lawyer Arthur H. Dean of the New York firm of Sullivan & Cromwell) warned that the act “contains many provisions not apparent on the first reading which will have a profound effect on the entire economic system of the country.” What’s more, Dean continued, the measure was “drastically deflationary” and “may seriously retard economic recovery.”

...

Much of the hostility toward the Green New Deal is difficult to separate from the right’s obsessive denigration of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—referred to affectionately by Glenn Beck and others as “Alexandria Occasional Cortex.” Commenters over at Free Republic describe her as a self-absorbed “bimbo” and a “very slow learner.” There’s an attitude of disbelief that this young woman could possibly be in Congress at all, let alone proposing something as ambitious as a Green New Deal. The apotheosis of this demonization campaign is the notion—put forward in an online video that has been promoted by Fox News host Sean Hannity among others—that Ocasio-Cortez is a puppet entirely controlled by the Justice Democrats, a caucus they portray as a Leninist vanguard of power-mad state planning. Ocasio-Cortez is, in this dark surmise, “not really the Congresswoman from New York’s 14th Congressional District. She is—essentially—an actress, she’s merely playing the part of a New York Congresswoman.” AOC is at once a virago drunk on her own self-aggrandizement and an incompetent ditz; the people who support her are dupes, idiots, or both.

In some ways, these critiques themselves echo the dismissive contempt many conservatives famously held for FDR; the president was often characterized as an intellectual lightweight (“a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would like very much to be president,” journalist Walter Lippmann, a founding editor of The New Republic, wrote in 1932). Occasionally, they depicted FDR as a cripple who had no business running for national office (these criticisms were more whispered while he was on the campaign trail than publicly lobbed at the exceedingly popular president). Both in the 1930s and today, such personal attacks become a way of diminishing the program while also implicitly undermining a demos foolish enough to have chosen such a fraudulent leader.

The more sophisticated critiques of the Green New Deal follow a rhetorical structure that Hirschman surely would have recognized from earlier campaigns against universal suffrage and the welfare state. Whatever the proponents of the Green New Deal may intend, such critics lament, their plans will actually lead to the exact opposite outcome. Writers at the American Enterprise Institute have argued that the Green New Deal will “unintentionally inhibit” investment in clean technology by encouraging companies to sign up for government contracts rather than invest in research and development to develop low-carbon machines. They have insisted that what looks like environmental legislation is in fact the opposite: “To achieve ‘Green New Socialism’ we would have to trash all existing environmental laws,” writes Mark Perry on the American Enterprise Institute’s Carpe Diem blog. Building renewable energy sources would mean abandoning habitat protections and other longstanding environmental laws—jeopardizing the natural landscape in return for preserving the social one, argues Myron Ebell over at the website of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Much the same set of unintended-cum-ironic consequences are sure to attend the Green New Deal’s specific provisions for economic reform. In the telling of its critics, the Green New Deal’s stated attempts to address economic inequality would only lead to the further entrenchment of crony capitalism and the impoverishment of the working-class people it purports to help.

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In a way, the public relations barrage is not at all surprising. After all, for many years, the entire public debate about climate change has been hamstrung by the wealth and political power of the fossil fuel industry. The top 25 oil and gas companies alone produced $73 billion in profits in 2017. Industries tied to fossil fuels spent nearly $2 billion in lobbying between 2000 and 2016, according to a report from the Public Accountability Initiative. As Kate Aronoff put it at The Intercept, the result has been that significant parts of the Republican political establishment recycle fuzzy science and insist that climate change is no more than a hoax, a socialist plot or some other variety of wild-eyed conspiratorial maneuver; meanwhile, those liberal politicians who admit the reality of the problem have entirely failed to generate any political energy for actually addressing it. As the Sunrise Movement has pointed out, many of these political leaders, too, routinely collect financial contributions from the fossil fuel industry.

No one objects to debate and analysis (though this is not quite the same as derisive laughter), and there’s clearly much that remains uncertain about the Green New Deal. But it’s hard to escape the sense that it has elicited such a strong response precisely because it represents the first effort to shake off the complacency and timidity that have for far too long marked the mainstream response to climate change. It’s the first attempt to mount a response to the emergency that treats it as an emergency. Here, too, looking back to the New Deal may be helpful. The 1930s businessmen and newspaper editors who assailed the first New Deal were in many cases alarmists, and in some instances, flat-out paranoid. The 1933 Securities Act was not, after all, the first step on the road to serfdom.

But in one key sense, they were on to something. In marshaling broad-based opposition to the first New Deal, they helped popularize the ideas of the business executives who joined the Liberty League or financed the Republicans in 1936 or resisted labor unions in the 1930s and again after World War II. And it’s true that, taken together, the measures of the New Deal did actually entail a significant transfer of political power and social resources away from the elite—a partial and limited one, but a substantive one nonetheless.

The same will be true of any meaningful proposal to cope with climate change. This is not a problem that can be confronted in a technocratic way that avoids all redistribution of resources; in its essence, it suggests that certain social goods are more important than an individual’s right to consume whatever he or she wants to with no regard for the consequences, or a company’s right to profit above all else. As such, it’s going to meet with tremendous resistance, and it will take an enormous show of political will to overcome it.

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I recommend the entire article.

It reads just like the socialist manifesto that it is!

 

[angelo]

Horrible article.
It's basically trying to argue that GND is great because 1) "right-wingers" are against it, ain't it funny 2) New Deal was criticized too, so GND will work out just like New Deal, just watch and 3) moderate liberals criticize it, so it must be good.
It no part of the article does the author actually defend any of the proposals of GND or address the substance of any of the criticism.


We have discussed at length the nonsensical protests at Standing Rock. The whole premise behind the protests was built on falsehoods, both regarding Indian land (it doesn't go through the reservation) and risk to the Mississippi water (it is negligible). The protests were also counterproductive because people ended up driving 1000 or 2000 miles (and some flew in as well, from as far away as Hawaii) with gas or diesel burning vehicles just to protest transport of oil. The idiocy of the protest is perhaps best summed up with this photo:

I am certainly not surprised that this is what inspired Occasional Cortex to go into politics ...

No. The article doesn't evaluate the GND, just the reichwing morons. Nice try, though.

I would suggest that the people who try to defend Occasional Cortez and he co authoring of the GND are the morons who are living in Alice In Wonderland's fantasy world!

 

[PyramidHead]

It reads just like the socialist manifesto that it is!

 

[lpetrich]

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "Mr. President, you’re from Queens. You may fool the rest of the country, but I’ll call your bluff any day of the week. Opening an impeachment inquiry is exactly what we must do when the President obstructs justice, advises witnesses to ignore legal subpoenas, & more. Bye https://t.co/4O9PNbYFki" / Twitter noting Donald J. Trump on Twitter: "Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “I think we have a very real risk of losing the Presidency to Donald Trump.” I agree, and that is the only reason they play the impeach card, which cannot be legally used!" / Twitter