A "lobbyist for a major bank" told Reuters that they're afraid to meet with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who now sits on Congress's Financial Services Committee, because "anything you do or say can be used against you" — the lobbyist likened meeting with AOC to "going in to talk to the FBI."

Amazon's plan to bring 25,000 jobs to a NYC campus is under fire from locals, as more details are revealed of what was promised to Jeff Bezos' empire.

The Democrats have started hearings on HR1, a comprehensive anti-corruption and voting rights bill, and House Oversight and Government Reform Committee member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gets to participate, which is great news for all of us.

Just as the purpose of a tobacco tax is not to pay for cancer treatment, the purpose of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's wildly popular proposal to tax income over $10m at 70% is to correct inequality and reduce the corrosive power of extreme wealth to distort political decisionmaking, not to fund programs.

Oh, sure, the Democratic leadership says it takes climate change seriously, but that same leadership has sidelined the Green New Deal and gutted the climate committee, replacing it with a lame-duck committee led and staffed by beneficiaries of big energy sector dollars.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Michael Dell was asked about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's wildly popular proposal to tax income over $10,000,000 at 70%, but before he could answer ("I'm not supportive…And I do not think it will help the growth of the US economy") the audience erupted into laughter, according to CNN. — Read the rest

With the World Economic Forum kicking off in Davos, Switzerland — where the super-rich are already decrying Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's massively popular 70% tax-rate on earning over $10,000,000 — it's a great time to revisit Anand Giridharadas's must-read 2018 book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, in which the former McKinsey consultant and Aspen Institute fellow catalogs the way that the super-rich have starved their host-nations of the funds needed to operate a functional civilization, and then laundered their reputations by dribbling back some of that looted booty in the form of "philanthropic donations" that always seem to redound to their personal benefit.

It's been three days since C-SPAN posted Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's amazing, stirring freshman speech from the floor of Congress, and it has smashed all Congressional C-SPAN records with 3.1m views (as of the time of writing); at this rate, it may catch up with C-SPAN's most popular Senate video, the Kamala Harris/Brett Kavanaugh video, with 7.14m views.

During a 60 Minutes interview Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez casually mentioned that she thought that America's super-rich should pay a marginal tax-rate of 70% on annual earnings over $10,000,000 (which is a better deal than they got under Reagan); since then, the proposal has roiled the political classes and billionaire-backed news outlets, who coincidentally oppose taxing billionaires. — Read the rest

Teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District (America's largest district) are walking the picket line this week in the pouring rain, demanding an end to the billionaire dark-money backed privatization movement that funnels public education funds to the shareholders of racially segregated, underperforming charter schools.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has some stiff competition when it comes to dance videos. Twitter user @katiemgould missed her flight in Atlanta and had to wait four hours for another plane. But rather than sit around in a bored stupor, she took advantage of the airport and made this MTV-worthy music video to "You Make My Dreams," by Hall & Oates. — Read the rest

In response to the old-fart Republicans who thought they finally had a gotcha moment by digging up a college dance video of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, she fired back with the best tweet of all – a new dance inside a hall on Capital Hill. — Read the rest

"The honorable Nancy Pelosi of California, having received the majority of the votes cast is duly elected the representative for the 116th Congress."

And after those words were spoken, cheers and clapping and a standing ovation for the Speaker-Elect.

Generally, the DNC is a fucking pro-establishment dumpster fire (which may explain why it's foundering), but things are (finally) looking up.

The Green New Deal — championed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other progressive Dems — is one of the most popular Democratic policies in living memory, supported by 81% of registered voters (including 64% of Republicans and 57% of "conservative Republicans"), so of course the Democratic establishment is trying to kill it.

The right-wing disinfotainment machine is making a big push to shame New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for not dressing in rags as befits a person of modest means. The purpose of the smear campaign is to take attention away from the issues Ocasio-Cortez is dedicated to: Medicare for everyone, ending the student debt catastrophe, justice reform, ending global warming. — Read the rest

The 78-member Congressional Progressive Caucus is meant to be the democracy-friendly, corporate-hostile wing of the Democratic Party, which is why the caucus announced a year ago that it would stop accepting corporate money — but a year later, nearly every member is still accepting corporate money in their individual capacity.

Last night Carla and I attended a screening for an upcoming National Geographic documentary called Science Fair, about the International Science and Engineering Fair. It's a terrific movie about smart young scientists from around the world. One thing I learned watching it is that students in Germany pay almost nothing to attend college. — Read the rest

Zephyr Teachout (previously) isn't just an expert on antitrust law and corruption, and isn't merely a netroots pioneer who has been on the right side of every technology policy fight since the Gore years — she's also running to be the Attorney General of the State of New York, from which position she plans on gutting Trump on his corrupt business practices, targeting him using the dread emoluments clause.

For generations, American mainstream politicians have smeared socialist movements by equating them with Stalinism and other forms of authoritarianism, but today, "socialism" is a label more and more people are embracing.