The Progressive Wing

A MESSAGE FROM THE FUTURE WITH ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ

TODAY, THE INTERCEPT launches “A Message From the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” a seven-minute film narrated by the congresswoman and illustrated by Molly Crabapple. Set a couple of decades from now, it’s a flat-out rejection of the idea that a dystopian future is a forgone conclusion. Instead, it offers a thought experiment: What if we decided not to drive off the climate cliff? What if we chose to radically change course and save both our habitat and ourselves?

What if we actually pulled off a Green New Deal? What would the future look like then?

This is a project unlike any we have done before, crossing boundaries between fact, fiction, and visual art, co-directed by Kim Boekbinder and Jim Batt and co-written by Ocasio-Cortez and Avi Lewis. To reclaim a phrase from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, it’s our “green dream,” inspired by the explosion of utopian art produced during the original New Deal.

And it’s a collaboration with a context and a history that seems worth sharing.

Back in December, I started talking to Crabapple — the brilliant illustrator, writer, and filmmaker — about how we could involve more artists in the Green New Deal vision. Most art forms are pretty low carbon, after all, and cultural production played an absolutely central role during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s.

We thought it was time to galvanize artists into that kind of social mission again — but not in a couple of years, if politicians and activists manage to translate what is still only a rough plan into law. No, we wanted to see Green New Deal art right away — to help win the battle for hearts and minds that will determined whether it has a fighting chance in the first place.

Crabapple, along with Boekbinder and Batt, have been honing a filmmaking style that has proved enormously successful at spreading bold ideas fast, most virally in their video with Jay Z on the “epic fail” of the war on drugs. “I would love to make a video on the Green New Deal with AOC,” Crabapple said, which seemed to me like a dream team.
The question was: How do we tell the story of something that hasn’t happened yet?

We realized that the biggest obstacle to the kind of transformative change the Green New Deal envisions is overcoming the skepticism that humanity could ever pull off something at this scale and speed. That’s the message we’ve been hearing from the “serious” center for four months straight: that it’s too big, too ambitious, that our Twitter-addled brains are incapable of it, and that we are destined to just watch walruses fall to their deaths on Netflix until it’s too late.

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The morning thread is filling up and there will likely plenty to talk about when Bernie appears on Fox News tonight. It begins at 6:30 ET.

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Bernie Sanders unveils new Medicare-for-all legislation, a key component of his 2020 presidential bid

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) released a new version of his Medicare-for-all plan on Wednesday, putting a spotlight on the debate among 2020 Democratic presidential contenders over the future of America’s health-care system.

At an event on Capitol Hill, Sanders unveiled his latest version of a single-payer plan, which would replace the patchwork of public and private insurers with a government-run system that Sanders argues would ultimately save consumers money.

Sanders said he is seeking to replace a “dysfunctional” system based on “greed and profiteering” by health insurance companies.

“Together we are going to end the international embarrassment of the United States of America, our great country, being the only major nation on earth not to guarantee health care to all as a right,” Sanders said. “This is a struggle for the heart and soul of who we are as American people.”

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Sanders’s new bill is similar to past legislation he has introduced but now includes coverage for long-term-care services, benefits that further increase the cost.

Sanders introduced his plan inside a crowded room in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, flanked by activists and medical industry professionals. They stood in front of a blue banner, framed by two U.S. flags, that bore the slogan, “Health care is a right.”

The event underscored how much headway Sanders has made among Democrats in pushing what was viewed as a fringe idea during his last presidential bid.

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In a statement later Wednesday, Sanders suggested that if he is elected president and Democrats retake control of the Senate, there’s a realistic scenario for his plan to pass.

Sanders cited a provision in Senate rules that allows some legislation to be considered as part of the budget reconciliation process, which requires only a simple majority of the chamber to advance rather than the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster.

“I would remind everyone that the budget reconciliation process, with 51 votes, has been used time and time again to pass major pieces of legislation and that under our Constitution and the rules of the Senate, it is the vice president who determines what is and is not permissible under budget reconciliation,” Sanders said. “I can tell you that a vice president in a Bernie Sanders administration will determine that Medicare for All can pass through the Senate under reconciliation and is not in violation of the rules.”

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