How AOC Is Changing The Game

[homersapien 11,357]

While I am not (yet) an avid supporter of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, this article certainly strikes a cord.  I think the country may be ready for her message.

Loved the part about how right wingers are obsessed about her.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is showing how the left can seize control of the political conversation. Can she keep it up?

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/01/how-a-o-c-is-changing-the-game

 

[Grumps 3,704]

I don't know much about her, but she seems to be the left's version of Trump. Trump tells his base what they want to hear and keeps his name out front by saying outraging things.

[johnnyAU 3,630]

She isn't changing any game. Idiots have been elected to congress long before her.  One of them thought Guam was in danger of capsizing and tipping over not long ago. 

[homersapien 11,357]

11 hours ago, Grumps said:

I don't know much about her, but she seems to be the left's version of Trump. Trump tells his base what they want to hear and keeps his name out front by saying outraging things.

"outraging" things? 

Like what?

[homersapien 11,357]

10 hours ago, johnnyAU said:

She isn't changing any game. Idiots have been elected to congress long before her.  One of them thought Guam was in danger of capsizing and tipping over not long ago. 

Didn't read the article, huh?

[Zeek 16,643]

11 hours ago, johnnyAU said:

She isn't changing any game. Idiots have been elected to congress long before her.  One of them thought Guam was in danger of capsizing and tipping over not long ago. 

Yeah, AOC is not very bright and it shows almost every time she steps up to a podium. Half baked is a good way to describe a lot of her ideas. Her opinions are a mile wide-inch deep.

[homersapien 11,357]

Ocasio-Cortez is Right: Our Economic System Needs Major Changes

I’m a moderate Democrat, and I don’t always agree with AOC’s politics. But she’s giving voice to millions of Americans who work hard but get left behind.

By HAROLD FORD JR.

(excerpt)

..........I have always been a pro-growth Democrat. When I was in Congress, I favored cutting taxes to stimulate the economy and supported strategic investments in infrastructure, scientific research and development, and public education. Since leaving Congress, I’ve worked for two powerful investment banking firms. Like President John F. Kennedy, I’ve long operated from the belief that a rising tide of strong economic growth lifts all boats and strengthens our nation long term.

And while I still believe that, I believe we can’t keep pretending that the strain of American capitalism we’ve clung to for decades hasn’t had serious—and sometimes negative—outcomes for many millions of Americans.

When the top 1 percent owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent; when the richest nation in the world still does not have universal early-childhood education; when an opioid epidemic killed more people last year than all the U.S. troops killed in the Vietnam War, driven largely by a pervasive economic despair that has enveloped large swaths of our country; and when we continually underinvest in our public education system and thereby undermine the most important lifeline to economic opportunity, it’s time to abandon the comforts of our traditional orthodoxies.

It’s time for all of us—especially those of us who have long supported pro-growth policies—to ask: How do we modernize the American economic compact to produce growth in a way that provides more equity and fairness to the tens of millions of Americans left behind?

Now, while I don’t always agree with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the first-term congresswoman from New York, I applaud that she’s giving voice to the primary grievance of the millions of Americans who want major and lasting changes to a system they don’t see working for them: the idea that ultrawealthy and well-connected elites control too much of the wealth generated in this economy. She lives among her constituents, whose lives are being upended by our changing economy and who can’t seem to get ahead no matter how hard they work, and she knows that new ideas are imperative to address these economic times.

We should not dismiss her ideas cavalierly or attack her by calling her a radical, as some are doing. Instead, her ideas—raising the marginal tax rate on the ultrawealthy, enacting "Medicare for all," investing serious resources in public education, reforming campaign finance laws, and so on—merit serious discussion. They should be accepted or rejected not based on whether you like Ocasio-Cortez but on whether they would actually work.

Eric Foner, the Columbia University professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, reminds us that American history is replete with ideas initially dismissed as radical but which were ultimately accepted because they were right, proved to work and made our nation safer and stronger. Social Security, the Interstate Highway System, civil rights laws, Medicare and Medicaid—all started out as radical ideas but are now seen as fundamental responsibilities of government, ones that we cannot imagine our society functioning without.......

Read the full piece at: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/01/31/harold-ford-ocasio-cortez-aoc-economic-policy-224430

 

 

[Grumps 3,704]

10 hours ago, homersapien said:

"outraging" things? 

Like what?

My apologies, it should have said "outrageous".

[Grumps 3,704]

 "the world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change."

[TitanTiger 20,472]

On 1/30/2019 at 10:16 PM, Grumps said:

I don't know much about her, but she seems to be the left's version of Trump. Trump tells his base what they want to hear and keeps his name out front by saying outraging things.

They have very different versions of "outrageous" and they have little to do with political views.

[johnnyAU 3,630]

21 hours ago, homersapien said:

American history is replete with ideas initially dismissed as radical but which were ultimately accepted because they were right, proved to work and made our nation safer and stronger

And hers aren't one of those by any stretch

[Grumps 3,704]

Sounds like Trump to me.

 

https://www.businessinsider.com/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-tweets-twitter-delete-2019-1

She argues that her online presence allowed her to bypass a media largely uninterested in her race and communicate directly with voters.

"It was literally just through tweeting and getting that feedback and learning through commentary and testing messages," she said. "Because every time you tweet something how it performs is basically like an A/B test."

[Grumps 3,704]

Why don’t people ever tell billionaires who want to run for President that they need to “work their way up” or that “maybe they should start with city council first”?

[Grumps 3,704]

"Unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs. Unemployment is low because people are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week and can barely feed their family."

[Grumps 3,704]

 

"A 17-year-old can walk into a shop" and purchase an assault weapon

[Grumps 3,704]

Then the last key, which is extremely, extremely important is re-prioritization. Just last year we gave the military a $700 billion budget increase, which they didn’t even ask for. They’re, like, 'we don’t want another fighter jet!' They’re, like, 'don’t give us another nuclear bomb,' you know?”

[Brad_ATX 13,654]

14 minutes ago, Grumps said:

Why don’t people ever tell billionaires who want to run for President that they need to “work their way up” or that “maybe they should start with city council first”?

If you're going to use her quotes, at least use them in context.  Otherwise you're being disingenuous and purposefully misleading.  She was replying to someone being an ass towards her making a snarky comment about not working her way up the political ladder.

 

[Zeek 16,643]

Quote

Ocasio-Cortez continued to argue the days of capitalism are numbered:

"And so I do think that right now we have this no-holds-barred, Wild West hyper-capitalism. What that means is profit at any cost. Capitalism has not always existed in the world, and it will not always exist in the world. When this country started, we were not a capitalist [nation], we did not operate on a capitalist economy." 

Again, I don't understand how anyone can get behind her and this socialist movement. The "hyper-capitalism" is laughable. If we're a hyper-capitalist society then we don't have any of the numerous social programs that are currently taking a huge chunk of our financial pie; not saying all of those programs are bad but to call us hyper-capitalist is completely inaccurate.

Even if we were the Wild West of capitalism, what's so terrible about that? Capitalism has brought more people out of poverty than any other system in the history of societies.

Quote

In the same interview, Ocasio-Cortez also referred to the situation in Palestine as an “occupation” by Israel.

When Hoover asked Ocasio-Cortez to clarify her position after pointing out the term “occupation” was controversial, Ocasio-Cortez, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in economics and international relations from Boston University, struggled to explain her comment.

“I am not the expert on geopolitics on this issue,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “You know, for me, I’m a firm believer in finding a two-state solution on this issue.”

The anti-Israel sentiment is just one I'll never connect with.

Quote

In another interview, speaking with former Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett on the liberal podcast “Pod Save America,” Ocasio-Cortez claimed the “upper-middle class doesn’t exist anymore.”

Ocasio-Cortez was discussing the political ideology of the country’s different socioeconomic classes when she made the claim:

"I think that politically, this upper-middle class is probably more moderate, but that upper-middle class doesn’t exist anymore in America, and thanks to the continued deregulation of Wall Street, thanks to the continued gutting of working- and middle-class people, we need stronger champions."

However, both the Urban Institute, and the American Enterprise Institute have presented evidence showing the upper-middle class is actually growing.

She thinks, but she doesn't actually know.

Quote

When asked in an interview with Jorge Ramos last week about how to pay for Sen. Bernie Sanders’, I-V.T., “Medicare for All” proposal, which Ocasio-Cortez has put at the center of her campaign, Ocasio-Cortez responded, “You just pay for it.” She continued: 

People often say, how are you gonna pay for it? And I find the question so puzzling because, how do you pay for something that’s more affordable? How do you pay for cheaper rent? How do you pay for—you just pay for it.

During this election cycle, Ocasio-Cortez and other progressive Democrats like Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, who lost the Florida gubernatorial race, have claimed Sanders’ “Medicare for All” plan would save the country $2 trillion if implemented, but the claim has been criticized by fact-checkers as inaccurate.

In fact, a study by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University shows the plan would cost more than $32.6 trillion over 10 years, requiring historic tax hikes.

Again, she's just talking out of her behind with no real understanding of politics or the inner workings of her goals. I think she's just like any other average Joe who just goes "well I just think we should do _________". Mile wide-inch deep.

Quote

In a speech on her economic plan, Ocasio-Cortez likened combating climate change to the challenge posed by Nazi Germany in World War II, surmising the United States confront the issue with the same amount of resources.

“So we talk about existential threats, the last time we had a really major existential threat to this country was around World War II, and so we’ve been here before and we have a blueprint of doing this before,” Ocasio-Cortez said, adding: 

What we had was an existential threat in the context of a war. We had a direct existential threat with another nation, this time it was Nazi Germany, and the Axis, who explicitly made the United States as an enemy, as an enemy. And what we did was that we chose to mobilize our entire economy and industrialized our entire economy and we put hundreds if not millions of people to work in defending our shores and defending this country. We have to do the same thing in order to get us to 100 percent renewable energy, and that’s just the truth of it.

I agree that work needs to be done to combat climate change. However, this is a bunch of gibberish and it just adds to the growing heap of things that the left has now compared to Nazis. Find a better analogy or comparison AOC.

Quote

When asked by Chris Hayes on MSNBC about what she plans to do once she gets to Congress in two months, Ocasio-Cortez struggled to develop a coherent response and failed to offer any specifics. Instead, Ocasio-Cortez delivered this message on air:

"Well, I think a lot of it has to do with changing our strategy around governance. You know there’s a lot of inside baseball and inside the beltway as you, you always hear that term thrown around. But there are very few organizers in Congress. And I do think that organizers operate differently. It’s a different kind of strategy. And what it is, is really about organizing and, and really thinking about that word: organizing. Segmenting people. Being strategic in their actions in really bringing together a cohesive strategy of putting pressure on the chamber instead of only focusing on the pressures inside the chamber."

She seriously sounds like a student who had to write a speech the morning that it was due and can't remember what they wrote down. It's not like the media doesn't feed these people the questions that will be asked and this isn't a 'gotcha' question. Hell, it's a lob. He simply asked what her plans were in her first two months of being a congresswoman.

We do not have an educated voter base and it's why we're in the position that we are. People get elected because they look nice, they're a certain race and/or gender, and they promote things that sound nice on paper but couldn't work or shouldn't be implemented. 

[homersapien 11,357]

You haters are a hoot.

You act as if we aren't on the verge of a social and political crisis regarding the distribution of wealth. 

Must be nice to be so wealthy you cannot conceive of that as a problem.

[homersapien 11,357]

1 hour ago, Grumps said:

"Unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs. Unemployment is low because people are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week and can barely feed their family."

So, can you disprove that?

[homersapien 11,357]

16 hours ago, Grumps said:

 "the world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change."

As opposed to "it's a Chinese Hoax". 

[TitanTiger 20,472]

1 hour ago, homersapien said:

So, can you disprove that?

The erroneous part is that unemployment numbers don't go down further because the same person adds another job or two.  It's just a percentage of people in the job market who have a job.

Now what she probably meant to say was, "Yes, unemployment numbers are low, but that doesn't mean everything is great.  Some people are underemployed and others are having to work two jobs now to make up for the job they lost that paid significantly more.  So many people are worse off even though unemployment is down."

[Grumps 3,704]

4 hours ago, homersapien said:

As opposed to "it's a Chinese Hoax". 

You are making my point. She is the left's version of Trump. You can take her Tweets and quotes and find the opposite sentiment from Trump that is equally shallow. I don't dislike her. She says things that make me laugh and is MUCH easier to look at.

[Grumps 3,704]

3 hours ago, TitanTiger said:

The erroneous part is that unemployment numbers don't go down further because the same person adds another job or two.  It's just a percentage of people in the job market who have a job.

Now what she probably meant to say was, "Yes, unemployment numbers are low, but that doesn't mean everything is great.  Some people are underemployed and others are having to work two jobs now to make up for the job they lost that paid significantly more.  So many people are worse off even though unemployment is down."

Thanks. You always explain things better than I do.

[homersapien 11,357]

5 hours ago, Grumps said:

You are making my point. She is the left's version of Trump. You can take her Tweets and quotes and find the opposite sentiment from Trump that is equally shallow. I don't dislike her. She says things that make me laugh and is MUCH easier to look at.

No you're wrong.

The difference is she may be right  - or at least off a little bit regarding timing -  whereas Trump is obviously totally delusional in his anti-science denial.