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Heres’s our own Perry Gaskill with some thoughts on why things are the way they are; the best way see where you’re going is to look at where you’ve been. Here’s Perry:<\/p>\n
Perry Gaskill <\/strong> Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was sitting in a classroom at Boston University when she got a phone call telling her that her father had died. The date was September 9, 2008 on a Tuesday.<\/p>\n Among other events that same day was increasing turmoil on Wall Street amounting to a slow-motion train wreck. Lehman Brothers, the nations fourth largest investment bank, and one deeply involved in sub-prime mortages, would file for bankruptcy a week later after 158 years in business. And when Lehman went down, it took the rest of the market with it, plunging the country into a deep recession.<\/p>\n Those caught up in the financial chaos included Joe Crowley, a 20-year New York City congressman from Queens who emerged as a key player in pushing for a Wall Street bailout. The efforts of Crowley and others would yield things such as “too big to fail” policy and the TARP program. Political observers at the time also speculated that Crowley’s motives weren’t exactly altruistic; he apparently had received campaign donations from financial firms.<\/p>\n As fate would have it, Ocasio-Cortez and her mother would have additional problems following the death of Ocasio-Cortez’s architect father when it emerged he had died without a will. This meant his estate would get caught up in the Surrogate’s Court system for Westchester County, New York. By any measure Surrogate’s Court is something of a byzantine bureacracy which in Ocasio-Cortez’s case would require four years and very large legal fees to resolve. This at a time the real estate market was in a meltdown. It would also eventually require that Ocasio-Cortez and her mother lose a Westchester house and move downscale. The mom headed to Florida; Ocasio-Cortez wound up in the Bronx and Joe Crowley’s district.<\/p>\n It might also be possible at first blush to assume that Ocasio-Cortez would have been a Hillary Clinton supporter during the last presidential election; one of those sobbing young women seen on election night when the Clinton campaign went down in flames. In reality, Ocasio-Cortez had been a Bernie Sanders supporter which allowed her to make contacts that would prove useful later to her political career.<\/p>\n “The 28-year-old former bartender had been a field organizer for Bernie Sanders, phone-banked for Barack Obama and worked in Sen. Ted Kennedy\u2019s office as a college student, but Ocasio-Cortez was jaded.” according to Rolling Stone<\/i>.<\/p>\n In late 2016, just around the time the house in Westchester was finally sold, and shortly after being involved in oil pipeline protests in North Dakota, Ocasio-Cortez was contacted by a new political group called Justice Democrats who were wondering if she would be interested in running against Crowley in the 2018 primary. The timing was not a coincidence. The current executive director of Justice Democrats, based in Knoxville, was a woman named Alexandra Rojas who had also worked on the Sanders campaign as an IT data cruncher.<\/p>\n “I first started considering running for Congress, actually, at Standing Rock in North Dakota,” she said in a Guardian<\/i> interview late last year. “It was really from that crucible of activism where I saw people putting their lives on the line for people they\u2019ve never met and never known. When I saw that, I knew that I had to do something more.”<\/p>\n Opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline would involve thousands of activists and multiple protests over a period of months. Besides Ocasio-Cortez, some of those protesters included members of campus-based fossil fuel divestment campaigns which had been around almost a decade and were already losing momentum. As individual fossil fuel divestment chapters started to shut down, volunteers and donations were directed toward the recently established Sunrise Movement which was created in 2017 to influence the 2018 elections.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, back in the ‘hood, incumbent congressman Joe Crowley appeared to have the borough of Queens in New York locked up. Not only was he the 10-term congressman for the Bronx\/Queens district, he was also head of the County Democratic Party which controls the Surrogate\u2019s Court cash cow. Outspending Crowley in a head-on primary race was not an option for Ocasio-Cortez, but using free volunteers courtesy of activist resources was.<\/p>\n As it happened, Ocasio-Cortez was not alone in catching the attention of Justice Democrats; they had put together a list of 79 radical democrats to take on exiting moderate democrats who, apparently, were not quite up to the socialist vision. These new candidates included women such as Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar.<\/p>\n As an example of how things worked, Rojas and others helped Ocasio-Cortez out with such things as the scut work of sending out campaign text messages.<\/p>\n Ocasio-Cortez also didn’t come up with the term Green New Deal on her own. All that Green New Deal stuff dates back to 2007 and a pair of pieces by New York Times<\/i> globalist Thomas Friedman. Since then, it’s been carried forward by a number of groups including the current Sunrise Movement which is now seeking to spend trillions of public dollars in an effort to halt anthropogenic global warming.<\/p>\n For various reasons, including being the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, and in a political upset at that, the news media has now bestowed on Ocasio-Cortez the kind of fame usually reserved for rockstars and A-list actors behaving badly. Then too, if there’s anything a generally parochial mainstream media likes to do, it’s talking about New Yorkers who are talking about New Yorkers talking about New York.<\/p>\n Even its most loyal supporters consider the Green New Deal to be something ill-defined and evolving. If Ocasio-Cortez is not the main brains behind the Green New Deal, she still has a key role as a public face. Sort of like, without putting too fine a point on it, Joe Isuzu in the old car commercials, only better looking. It’s also useful to think of the Green New Deal as part of a much broader agenda now in play by Justice Democrats. Such an agenda also apparently buys heavily into the popular millennial victim trope that they are the first generation to be worse off than their parents.<\/p>\n A recent list of Justice Democrat demands, according to Wikipedia sources, goes something like this:<\/p>\n – Creating a new infrastructure program called the “Green New Deal” And, it’s probably not a leap to imagine, a pony.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\n(Author’s note: In order to understand what newly-elected congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is about, it’s probably useful to go back more than just the last couple of years. The following is offered as part biography, and partly to provide political context to supplement some prior TAH commentary. Consider it an attempt at more-or-less objective intel. – PG)<\/i><\/p>\n
\n– Discontinuing arms sales to countries that violate human rights such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt
\n– Enacting a federal jobs guarantee, which would promise all Americans a job paying $15 per hour plus benefits
\n– Ending the death penalty
\n– Ending the practice of unilaterally waging war, except as a last resort to defend U.S. territory
\n– Ending the War on Drugs in favor of legalization, regulation, and taxation of drugs, and pardoning all non-violent drug offenders and treating all drug addicts
\n– Ensuring free speech on college campuses and supporting net neutrality
\n– Ensuring universal education as a right, including free public college and university education
\n– Ensuring universal healthcare as a right
\n– Establishing paid maternity leave, paid vacation leave, and free childcare
\n– Expanding anti-discrimination laws to apply to homosexual and transgender people
\n– Expanding background checks on firearms and banning high capacity magazines and assault weapons
\n– Funding Planned Parenthood and other contraceptive and abortion services, and recognizing reproductive rights
\n– Implementing electoral reform and publicly financed elections nationwide to make irrelevant and obsolete fundraising from large corporations and the wealthy
\n– Implementing instant-runoff voting nationwide in an effort to make third-party and independent candidates more viable
\n– Implementing the Buffett Rule, ending offshore financial centers, “chain[ing]” the capital gains and income taxes, and increasing the estate tax
\n– Making the minimum wage a living wage and tying it to inflation
\n– Pardoning Edward Snowden, prosecuting CIA torturers and DoD war criminals, shutting down the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and all other extrajudicial prisons, and ending warrantless spying and bulk data collection by the National Security Agency
\n– Passing the Paycheck Fairness Act
\n– Abolishing the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE)
\n– Reforming police by mandating body cameras, establishing community oversight boards, eliminating broken windows policing, ending stop and frisk, and appointing special prosecutors to hold police accountable in courts
\n– Renegotiating other free trade deals CAFTA-DR, and NAFTA and opposing the Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China and the World Trade Organization
\n– Stopping any reductions to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and establishing single-payer universal healthcare
\n– Stopping anthropogenic climate change through an ecological revolution and upholding the United States’ participation in the Paris Climate Agreement
\n– Uncompromisingly rejecting President Trump’s immigration proposals and policies, particularly the Executive Order 13769 and deportation of illegal immigrants, and implementing comprehensive immigration reform which will give non-criminal illegal immigrants a path to citizenship.<\/p>\n