Showing posts with label progressive. Show all posts
Showing posts with label progressive. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 24, 2021

Buy My Democratic Capitalism Book



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Saturday, April 18, 2020

Elizabeth Warren Would Be A Great Choice

In some quarters they are talking about Elizabeth Warren as being the VP pick for Biden. I think that would be a wonderful choice to make. It would certainly be the most democratic choice. There were two clear streams this primary season. Biden represents one. The other can be represented by Warren. She is a progressive who is clearly not a socialist. And she goes low when Trump goes low. She goes toe to toe. Politics is war by other means.

Picking Warren would be great to bring about party unity. And we can expect to see AOC back on the campaign trail with Warren. She will do for Warren this Fall what she did for the B man last Fall. Warren wanted AOC to do that for her last Fall, but then B man went ahead and had a heart attack. That tugged at AOC's heart. Besides, Bernie only popped up because Warren refused to run in 2016. Hillary was the Biden of 2016.

If Warren is on the ticket no lefty will be talking about if Biden went far enough for them or not. You get Warren, all such anxieties are soothed. Besides, this pandemic makes Bernie look like a Wall Street don.

Biden should pick Warren. Wait, the names even rhyme. I just noticed.

They both can retire and make room for AOC in 2028.



Warren hits Trump: He's trying to turn a health crisis into 'a political rally for himself'

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Monday, March 30, 2020

AOC Is Joshua?

“If Bernie is Moses, then AOC is Joshua”
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Monday, September 23, 2019

Young Progressives Making Mistakes






Hillary Clinton wanted to become the first female President Of The United States so bad that she decided on the self-goal of not putting Elizabeth Warren on the ticket. Donald Trump did not make her do it. She did it herself.

A Clinton Warren ticket would have been the Clinton Gore ticket. It would have won in a landslide. But, hey, hooray for self goals.

These four are the real squad. But they don't know how to get along to go along. They don't know how to join forces. Only one will run for office. And we know ultimately it is about running for office. If you don't run and win, you are left petitioning.

Just like Hillary needed to put Warren on the ticket in 2016, these four need to merge their two organizations Justice Democrats and the Sunrise Movement into one organization to be called Green New Deal Nation and they need to really organize. This requires accepting AOC as the mascot. She is first in class. She is the natural political leader. And she is ready.

The planet is not going to run on your schedule. So you better run on the planet's schedule. The time is now. It is already late.

These three firebrands run around like headless chickens. They don't realize their work becomes so much easier if they can only learn to get along.

AOC's committee work in Congress is death by a thousand cuts. She needs to get out there, and she needs to get out there in a big way.

Political leadership is not about saying I have written the most research papers, or have read them, it is not about saying I have organized the most rallies, or even addressed them. That is where the other members of the squad come in.

Political leadership is saying I ran for office and I won. That is AOC.

Capitalism's Own Propaganda Machine
The Blockchain Will Make A Global Wealth Tax Possible

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Thursday, June 06, 2019

Young And Progressive

57 percent of millennials call themselves consistently liberal or mostly liberal. Only 12 percent call themselves consistently conservative or mostly conservative. This is the most important statistic in American politics right now.
Recent surveys of Generation Z voters (those born after 1996) find that, if anything, they are even more liberal than millennials........ Only 16 percent of the Silent Generation is minority, but 44 percent of the millennial generation is. If you are a millennial in California, Texas, Florida, Arizona or New Jersey, ethnic minorities make up more than half of your age cohort. In just over two decades, America will be a majority-minority country....... Seventy-nine percent of millennials think immigration is good for America. Sixty-one percent think racial diversity is good for America...... They are much more sympathetic to those who identify as transgender. They are much more likely than other groups to say that racial discrimination is the main barrier to black progress. ....... conservative intellectuals seem hellbent on taking their 12 percent share among the young and turning it to 3.
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Sunday, June 02, 2019

Andrew Yang: The Only One With A Solution



Andrew Yang for President 2020 - YouTube

Andrew Yang is the only one with a solution. That solution is the Universal Basic Income. America is at the cusp of enormous rises in technology-driven productivity. But tech is agnostic. The political process has to rise up to the challenge.

China is trying its best to avoid what is known as the middle-income trap. When Nixon went to meet Mao in China, China was a country of farmers who could barely feed themselves. Today it is a large manufacturing country. It is called the factory of the world. But wages have risen, and China has lost some of its competitive advantages. And so China has to move to the next level or stagnate. The next level is high tech and the service sector.

Instead of America trying to get back its manufacturing base that even China has begun to lose, America has to assess what the next step for the American economy is.

The US made a huge mistake after the internet took off. It did not invest in health and education like it needed to. The US education system is still something that was designed for Henry Ford. A knowledge economy asks for paradigm shifts in education. France seems to have a pretty good system for health care. But not even universal health will solve the problem.

Universal Basic Income has to be the first and most important step. Everything else has to be built on top of that. And Andrew Yang is the only one talking about it.



Andrew Yang Recalls Getting Beat Up For Being The ‘Skinny Asian Kid’ his experiences as one of the lone Asian Americans growing up in his upstate New York town. ..... Yang said that, during his childhood, the prevailing cultural references to Asians were limited to “Long Duk Dong” of “Sixteen Candles” and the line from the movie “Platoon”: “That’s the way the gook laughs.” ...... while the disputes happened sporadically throughout his elementary school and junior high school years, Yang doesn’t recall teachers getting involved much. Bharara, who said he had similar experiences with bullying, also felt little support from teachers and staff. ..... The pair agreed that the experiences shaped how they operate within the world today. ..... “I felt myself to be that marginalized Asian kid throughout my entire life,” Yang said. “Whenever there’s a gathering of people, when I notice someone who’s out of place, I would naturally gravitate towards them.”

2020 Democrat Andrew Yang thinks the key to his success is standing next to Joe Biden at debates Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is making a name for herself in the 2020 campaign by cranking out policies. Former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), meanwhile, are hoping you know their names already. ..... Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), meanwhile, is more concerned that the person she's standing next to is "maybe going to be really tall"



Inside Andrew Yang's Outsider Campaign There’s nothing like an Andrew Yang campaign event. Nowhere else will fans show up wearing hats with MATH written across the top (“Make America Think Harder”). ...... an outside-the-box style that comes across as refreshing to voters who crave an outsider candidate. ...... Yang is vying to become the first Asian-American nominee of a major party. And while he remains a rounding error in the polls, his modest momentum reflects the enduring hunger for unconventional candidates. If his campaign can catch fire, he’d be further evidence that it’s no longer necessary to spend time serving in elected office or even to be conventionally good at retail politics. What matters, Yang suggests, is to think differently than Washington does. ...... “the opposite of Donald Trump is an Asian man who likes math” ....... Yang, 44, was born in New York to two immigrants from Taiwan. He graduated from high school in Exeter, N.H., in 1992, got an undergraduate degree from Brown and went to law school at Columbia, which he graduated from in 1999. ...... Then he ran a tutoring company that was acquired by test-prep giant Kaplan in 2009 for an undisclosed amount. (On the trail, Yang refers to it as a “modest fortune.”) ........ Along the way, Yang married and had two kids, including an autistic son. ...... Yang’s path led him in early 2017 to the Chelsea neighborhood in Manhattan, where he sat down to lunch with Andy Stern, the former president of Service Employees International Union. He’d read Stern’s book, Raising the Floor, which focuses on universal basic income and closes with the idea of someone running for president on the issue. Yang wanted to try it. ..... If your government teacher ever asked you to invent policy from scratch for a school assignment, the results might look something like his: imaginative, interesting and a little bit out there. ..... The first major moment of Yang’s campaign came after his appearance on comedian Joe Rogan’s podcast, where he first introduced himself to a large audience. After that he started gaining traction on Twitter and Reddit, largely for his universal basic income proposal....... while he can draw crowds in the thousands, Yang’s base is online. .... On Twitter, his follower count is more than 282,000 ....... “I think it’s because young people unfortunately have come of age in an era of institutional failure and erosion,” Yang says, “and so when they sense that someone is speaking in an institutional voice, they kind of tune out.”.... Yang’s theory of the case is that once people get to know him through the debates, they will realize his ceiling is “much higher than most other candidates” and begin to coalesce around him. He often says that people tell him he’s what they hoped for when they voted for Trump.







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Friday, March 15, 2019

AOC: The Roadmap



Abraham Lincoln went from the House to the White House. He was never Governor or Senator. John Kennedy went from being junior Senator, an absentee Senator hardly active in the committees, to being president.

AOC has to realize the committee structure in the House is a political swamp. No, she does not owe her constituents endless hours in committee. That is the way of slow political death. All the things AOC wants, they will not be done by committee, at least not by the current committees of the current House. Nancy Pelosi is a fine person, but she is not the answer. She does not have answers. It can be argued, she does not even have the questions.

The way you firmly establish Green New Deal on the 2020 map is by crisscrossing the country. Justice Democrats and the Sunrise Movement must merge and become one organization. That unified organization could call itself Green New Deal Nation. And AOC has to lead that organization. That organization has to fund AOC's national travels.

There is a minimum amount of committee work that no member of Congress can avoid. And that is fine. But that has to be kept to the barest minimum by someone like AOC. Her appeal is national. Her appeal is the new generation. Her platform is social media.

Granted committee work can also be a great way to earn political capital. One example, this bad guy video.

The Green New Deal is not a policy proposal, not yet. It is a conversation. It is a discussion. It is a grand conversation that has to be made grander. People have to participate. Steering that conversation is important.

AOC has to be proactive, not reactive. Proactive is participating in and shaping the conversation around the Green New Deal. Reactive is responding to every right-wing media zinger and responding to every news of the day. It is tempting. But don't give in.

The goal is to firmly establish the Green New Deal in a way that no Democrat in 2020 can afford to skip that. And committee participation is not how you gain that political capital. For that, you have to crisscross the country. Your personal staff cannot manage that. It has to be an organization.

The Green New Deal is an evolving policy proposal. And we are talking Green New Deal 1.0 right now. 2028 will be time for Green New Deal 2.0.

The Green New Deal is going to be an amazing fusion of technology and politics. Tech entrepreneurs are going to play a major role. In fact, the deciding role. But only vibrant democratic processes will make sure the human being will stay at the center of it all.


Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Unfavorable Rating Climbs: Gallup The congresswoman’s high profile so early in her term is exceeded only by that of Hillary Clinton in 2001, Gallup says. .... While half of Americans had not heard of or had no opinion of Ocasio-Cortez in September, more than 7 in 10 U.S. adults now know of and have an opinion of her .... The only more-recognized member of Congress so early in their term was Hillary Clinton, who had served as first lady before being elected to Congress .... Just 5 percent of GOP respondents reported that they have a favorable view of her, while nearly 6 in 10 Democrats say they like her. .... Younger adults and non-whites are also more likely to say they have a favorable idea of Ocasio-Cortez. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the most famous member of Congress: poll attributing her high name recognition to her outsize presence on social media and intense media coverage..... The main reason for the negative uptick: More Republicans are turned off by the self-described Democratic socialist.....56 percent of Democrats view her favorably compared to 15 percent who don’t.

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Wednesday, February 20, 2019

Amazon Walking Away Was A Loss For AOC

I was not even following the developments closely. I thought it was a done deal. Past tense. And then Amazon announced its exit. I was surprised. I still have not had the time to dig into the details. I did read the NYC Mayor's op-ed on the topic. And the AOC celebratory tweet. And there is this Wharton podcast, that I read. (I did not listen)



If it was a botched deal, maybe the NY Governor, and the NYC Mayor did not sell it to the people hard enough. Or maybe Amazon made the mistake of not engaging. Or the protestors did not see the full picture. It comes across as a political victory, but an economic loss.

When I think of the Green New Deal, I see a lot of high tech entrepreneurship. Otherwise, under the current economic paradigm, the Green New Deal can look really, really hard. Pricing out dirty energy is much smoother than trying to shut down an industry. There is no shutdown valve.

Just like the original New Deal created a new middle class and a new age of prosperity, I see the Green New Deal as ushering in an Age of Abundance.

You probably don't want to come across as anti-entrepreneurship. On the other hand, maybe Amazon should not be so stand-offish when it comes to ordinary people and their elected representatives. The local community matters. The city might have gotten 25,000 jobs. But what was Long Island City going to get specifically?

I see no evidence AOC was the central figure in the protests. (Some New Yorkers will protest a-n-y-t-h-i-n-g) But she obviously was supportive, and she obviously was celebratory after the fact. If it was a political victory, it was a grand one. Hey, not everything is business.

But I do think AOC should work harder to come across as pro-entrepreneurship.


















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Tuesday, January 01, 2019

Elizabeth Warren Has To Present Her Big Policies In Market Terms



My 30-30-30-10 formula, to be clear, has not been inspired by Senator Warren. It has been formulated after years of studying tech startups. For me, the tech sector and the public policy sectors have flowed parallel to each other. I have seen many intersection points over the years.

Much of what Senator Warren is saying just makes market sense to me.

A lot of people make the mistake of thinking capital means financial capital. Well, that is about one third of it, the other two pieces of the pie are human capital and technology. It can be argued financial capital is the least important of the three. By now technology outweighs the others. We are about to see tremendous rises in productivity. To the point Universal Basic Income will be forced upon us if we do not ourselves embrace it.

Some of what Senator Warren is proposing can be tweaked, of course. For example, why 40%? Why should labor get 40% of the vote on a Board? Why so rigid a number? It can not be a rigid number. It has to be the principle of meaningful representation. A rigid number is also harder sailing politically.

Most of what Senator Warren is proposing should be presented as market solutions to current problems.

For example, it is unconscionable that while America was experiencing a near Great Depression close to two trillion dollars were simply idling in the banks. The super rich were going to simply sit it out.

Breaking monopolies are about getting rid of distortions in the market so innovation can happen. It is pro-market.

Human capital has to be given its rightful place in capitalism. That is where universal education, mostly free, and lifelong, and universal health care, come into play, as well as Board representation for labor.

Formulating bold policy is not enough. It also has to be sold. It is not about fighting the good fight and going down in flames. It is about starting bold and being strategic and tactical along the way to ultimately make it happen, with the perfect not being allowed to be the enemy of the very good.

Senator Warren should not be a Knight In Shining Armor who has already thought it through. She should lay out broad outlines and then crowdsource the details. Deep engagement of the people in the process is as important as the outcome itself. The conversation has to be broad.

Not only a new policy but a new political culture itself has to be attempted. And, yes, you also have got to listen to the conservatives. They often times make fiscal sense when the far left can feel like a fiscal policy on a forest fire. In the new political culture, people owe each other face to face decent conversations where the listening is as if not more important than speaking. Decency has to be brought back into fashion.

Also, I want a two women ticket. Men have been occupying the mantle for like ever. How about always? Let's have some fresh air. Warren and Harris might attempt a East Coast West Coast thing. People like Beto and Gillum can have spots in the cabinet. Why not?

“If I could characterize Warren’s ideology, it’s that we should select the tool appropriate to each economic problem we face and not decide ahead of time that the same solution is appropriate,” said Marshall Steinbaum, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, a left-leaning think tank. ........ “Today, in market after market, competition is dying as a handful of giant companies gain more and more market share.” ........ Warren unveiled a housing bill that would aim to reward local governments for relaxing strict zoning laws that have prevented developers from expanding the supply of housing. The plan also calls for investing billions more in government spending in affordable-housing projects, as well as helping black families historically hurt by federal housing practices. ....... a bill that would create a permanent law enforcement unit to investigate crimes at banks and large financial institutions, ending what she has called “too big to jail.” The law would also require senior executives at banks with more than $10 billion in assets to annually certify they have “found no criminal conduct or civil fraud within the financial institution.” ......a bill requiring a national $15-an-hour minimum wage, as well as a plan that would make it easier for workers to form and join unions.
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