Last year, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez successfully challenged establishment Dem Joe Crowley for his seat in the Bronx; now Crowley works as a lobbyist, skirting the restrictions on lobbying by Congress by styling himself a "strategic consultant."
Tiffany Cabán is a 31 year old, Democratic Socialist, queer, Latinx public defender in New York City, who is running a grassroots campaign for the District Attorney's office in Queens; she's secured backing from the Democratic Socialists of America and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Gilead makes a drug called Truvada — AKA Prep — that was developed at US taxpayer expense, whose patents are held by the US government; Truvada is on track to eliminating the spread of HIV forever (people who are HIV positive but take Truvada are seemingly not infectious), but taking Truvada in the USA (where the patents haven't expired) is incredibly expensive, running $1,780/month, whereas in Australia, it's available as a generic for $8/month.
The guy sure has a knack for compounding the maximum number of lies into one line.
Back in 1995, Newt Gingrich defunded the Office of Technology Assessment, a low-cost, high-yield body that provided neutral, evidence-based assessments of technology to lawmakers so they could avoid making stupid blunders when it came to tech.
Yesterday, Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez jointly introduced The Loan Shark Prevention Act, which will cap credit card interest rates at 15% (and closes the loopholes that lets credit card issuers exceed their stated APRs with the use of hidden fees) and which re-establishes American post-office banking.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee says that it will refuse to contract with any vendor or consultant that offers services to primary challengers for the Democratic nomination: it's a rule that ensure that candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (who won a primary challenge against Joe Crowley, a right-wing finance industry creep who'd sat as a Democratic Congressman since 1999) will not be able to depose other establishment Dems.
One thing that immediately struck me in Lauren Gambino's excellent analysis of the Democratic nomination campaigns in The Guardian: a quote from GOP never-Trump political consultant Rick Wilson, who counseled Democrats not to select Bernie Sanders and make the election about actual policies, "Democrats have two choices: make this a referendum on Donald Trump or lose. — Read the rest
The Netflix doc Knock Down the House debuted at Sundance earlier this year, winning the Audience Award for U.S. Documentaries. Directed by Rachel Lears, it follows the midterm Congressional campaigns of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Amy Vilela, Cori Bush, and Paula Jean Swearengin. — Read the rest
Earlier this week, Kentucky Republican Congressman Andy Barr withdrew his invitation for Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to visit a coalmine in his district (made after AOC defended the Green New Deal as being better for working people, including coal miners, than GOP denial inaction on climate change).
Late last month, Rep. Andy Barr [R-KY] "invited" Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to visit the coal miners in his Appalachian district, by way of rebuttal to her brilliant response to the charge that the Green New Deal was a rich, city-person's luxury, taking no account of working, poor and rural people.
The Intercept has just released "A Message From the Future," a short science fiction movie narrated by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and drawn by Molly Crabapple, describing the coming "Green New Deal Decade," when Americans pulled together and found prosperity, stability, solidarity and full employment through a massive, nationwide effort to refit the country to be resilient to climate shocks and stem the tide of global climate change.
After Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez delivered a blistering rebuttal to Rep Sean Duffy's [R-WI] charge that the Green New Deal and environmentalism were "elitist" concerns that ignored the needs of rural people, Congressional Coal Caucus member Rep. Andy Barr [R-KY] invited her to visit Appalachian coal-towns and "go underground" to talk to people in the mining industry.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has a long history of being reactionary assholes who support the worst kind of corporate Democrats while libelling progressives and selling out to America's greediest and most rapacious corporate lobbies, so the latest move isn't much of a surprise, but it's still pretty fucking terrible.
'Sorry,' and it wasn't a DDOS, says Facebook.
During a talk at SXSW yesterday, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez got an audience question about automation and jobs and answered by saying, "We should not be haunted by the specter of being automated out of work. We should be excited by that. But the reason we're not excited by it is because we live in a society where if you don't have a job, you are left to die. — Read the rest
For the first time in our nation's history, the United States government is detaining over 50,000 people it claims to be undocumented immigrants in jails, prisons, and makeshift detention camps across America.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Rolling Stone interview with Alex Morris paints a portrait of a politician and activist whose brilliance as a tactician is matched by an unwavering, uncompromising commitment to principle.
Virtually everyone who's ever had the credit-rating system explained to them immediately understood that this was a complete scam: these companies that most of us have never heard of nonconsensually ingest gigantic mountains of data about you and your life and produce a numeric score that is nearly impossible to explain and extremely frustrating to alter, and that number is used to determine your access to work, rental accommodations, loans, mortgages and more.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Freshman Force is a new one-off graphic novel anthology from Chicago's highly topical Devil's Due comics, featuring Josh Blaylock, Tim Seeley, Hoyt Silva, Marguerite Dabaie, Dean Haspiel, Jill Thompson, Jose Garibaldi, Christa Cassano, Travis Hymel, Pat Shand, K. — Read the rest
