Category Archives: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Ayanna Pressley doesn’t like the DCCC’s new incumbent protection rules

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Most Americans live in gerrymandered House districts where the outcome of the general election is pre-determined in almost every cycle. This leaves most votes with almost no choice, reduces civic engagement and drives down voter participation. This is a fundamentally undemocratic system. The only thing keeping politicians from becoming completely unaccountable is the threat of a primary challenge. Ayanna Pressley was elected to Congress thanks to exactly such a primary challenge. She beat a 20-year incumbent, Michael Capuano to win the Democratic nomination for MA-7. So it’s understandable that she would take it a little personally when the DCCC revealed … Continue reading →

Wilbur Ross and Mark Meadows are deer in headlights during hearing with Cummings and AOC

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Wilbur Ross arrived for his Oversight committee hearing with all the false confidence of a billionaire who’s operated with impunity for decades. During the hearing, Ross claimed that his attempt to insert a citizenship question into the 2020 census was: Not influenced by Steve Bannon and Kris Kobach, both of whom urged him multiple times to include such a question to suppress immigrant response rates to the census That the question was included to comply with the voting rights act, and not to reduce the representation of states/areas with immigrant populations That in any case, he was merely reinstating a … Continue reading →

Castro, Harris, Warren declare support for reparations. What does that mean in policy terms?

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Here’s America’s first black president talking about reparations for slavery and systematic discrimination. Obama: Theoretically, you can make, obviously, a powerful argument that centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination are the primary cause for all those gaps. That those were wrongs done to the black community as a whole, and black families specifically, and that in order to close that gap, a society has a moral obligation to make a large, aggressive investment, even if it’s not in the form of individual reparations checks, but in the form of a Marshall Plan, in order to close those gaps. It is … Continue reading →

AOC asks why we don’t treat “human capital” creation at least as well as real-estate speculation.

The Progressive Wing Posted on by

Our ancestors knew this and translated it into actual policy (with flaws of course). Which is why they enacted the Land Grant Colleges act in 1862, funding institutions in each state through the grant of public lands: each State which may take and claim the benefit of this act, to the endowment, support, and maintenance of at least one college where the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific and classical studies, and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States … Continue reading →

1/7 News Roundup & Open Thread

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calls Trump a racist, outlines ‘radical’ policies on ‘60 Minutes’

Go ahead, “call me radical,” newly sworn-in Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told Anderson Cooper in an interview on “60 Minutes” that aired Sunday in which she also called President Trump a racist.

The 29-year-old Boston University graduate, who gained notoriety this past fall after defeating a longtime incumbent in her New York Democratic primary, has become the youngest woman to ever serve in the US Congress. In the interview that aired Sunday night on CBS, Ocasio-Cortez outlined some of her ambitious policy proposals — as well as her frank thoughts on Trump.

Although the freshman congresswoman acknowledged during the interview that she doesn’t often speak about the president — “I think he’s a symptom of a problem,” she said by way of an explanation — she did have choice words to say about him when Cooper asked.

“The president certainly didn’t invent racism. But he’s certainly given a voice to it and expanded it and created a platform for those things,” she said.

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In the “60 Minutes” interview, Ocasio-Cortez also spoke about her progressive policy ideas, as well as how she planned to pay for them. For starters, she floated the idea of a marginal tax in which the very rich would pay as much as 70 percent on a portion of their income to fund her programs, including a “Green New Deal,” which would convert the entire US economy to renewable energy sources.

“People are going to have to start paying their fair share in taxes,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

When Cooper continued to press Ocasio-Cortez on how she would pay for her proposals, she replied, “No one asks how we’re going to pay for this Space Force. No one asked how we paid for a $2 trillion tax cut. We only ask how we pay for it on issues of housing, health care, and education.”

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