Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

[lemonlime 5503]

 

[EuroHorn 3204]

Tax payers are paying her staff a living wage...

[Cheeseweasel 26437]

https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/open-letter-new-york-state-budget-director-robert-mujica-regarding-amazon

 

"Make no mistake, at the end of the day we lost $27 billion, 25,000-40,000 jobs and a blow to our reputation of being 'open for business.' The union that opposed the project gained nothing and cost other union members 11,000 good, high-paying jobs. The local politicians that catered to the hyper-political opposition hurt their own government colleagues and the economic interest of every constituent in their district. The true local residents who actually supported the project and its benefits for their community are badly hurt. Nothing was gained and much was lost. This should never happen again."

[Fozzz 152]

What a lightweight. 

 

 

[Homercles 10205]

 

Good lord they are obsessed with her. I regularly check on FN in an effort to have variety among the sources I use to generate my own opinion + see how it matches the sudden onslaught of talking points that seem to flood the board from our resident Trumptards...and I can always find a slew of AOC articles.

So much crush on a freshman member from a state thousands of mikes away.

[jimmyjazz 45512]

40 minutes ago, EuroHorn said:

Tax payers are paying her staff a living wage...

Should they not?  Should she not be able to use her budget as she sees fit?

Yeesh.  

[lemonlime 5503]

8 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

Should they not?  Should she not be able to use her budget as she sees fit?

Yeesh.  

So do GOP congressmen not pay their staffs living wages?  And their voters think it's a good thing that our employees aren't being paid a living wage?

 

Edit to add: this could explain a lot about how intellectually bankrupt the trump gop is.  I'm sure they're attracting the best and brightest  employees when they refuse to pay them a living wage, and think paying them enough to live on is communism.

Edited February 25, 2019 by lemonlime

[GSU&UT 1798]

Holy jesus, do you dipshits actually think she's taking more money from her constituents to pay her staff a better/livable wage vs if she didn't?

[wildcat09 29187]

16 minutes ago, lemonlime said:

So do GOP congressmen not pay their staffs living wages?  And their voters think it's a good thing that our employees aren't being paid a living wage?

 

Edit to add: this could explain a lot about how intellectually bankrupt the trump gop is.  I'm sure they're attracting the best and brightest  employees when they refuse to pay them a living wage, and think paying them enough to live on is communism.

Clearly it's preferable for only the independently wealthy and/or lobbyists to be able to work in public service.

[Js1 85055]

AOC - uses her congressional office/staff budget to pay a living wage

GOP - uses their congressional office/staff budget to make sure their staff runs personal errands or settle sexual harassment issues

[lemonlime 5503]

3 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

Clearly it's preferable for only the independently wealthy and/or lobbyists to be able to work in public service.  government in order to legislate themselves tax breaks they don't need.

FIFY

[Dahobbs 17420]

17 minutes ago, GSU&UT said:

Holy jesus, do you dipshits actually think she's taking more money from her constituents to pay her staff a better/livable wage vs if she didn't?

Yes, yes they do. 

[Js1 85055]

11 minutes ago, Dahobbs said:

Yes, yes they do. 

It's fucking hilarious.

They don't get a say in their individual office budget 
They can't "raise" more - you get what you've been allocated and overuse of funds comes out of their pocket
They aren't actually given the funds to do what they please - everything is disbursed through the Finance Offices for the House/Senate
They have to use the funds or lose them at the end of the year - can't pocket it or roll over unused funds

Good for her for setting a personnel budget that ensures her staff gets a living wage from the 2019 MRA. Oh the horror! The average Chief of Staff makes $154,634 and the district/state COS makes $136,443.  Almost like if you cut 20% off that, suddenly you have more money to ensure everyone else isn't making pittance.

Edited February 25, 2019 by Js1

[Foosters 17691]

1 hour ago, EuroHorn said:

Tax payers are paying her staff a living wage...

[David Dennison 18601]

1 hour ago, EuroHorn said:

Tax payers are paying her staff a living wage...

Well, yeah. Taxpayers pay Danny Goeb and his staff, too.

What's your point?

[mdmost 42775]

This is terrible. Next thing you know other Congressional staffers will get living wages and you know what that leads to, right? Anarchy.

[Onboard 2.0 9083]

1 hour ago, Js1 said:

AOC - uses her congressional office/staff budget to pay a living wage

GOP - uses their congressional office/staff budget to make sure their staff runs personal errands or settle sexual harassment issues

Hey why don't you just gouge out your other eye so you can be totally blind instead of just half way there.  What an ignorant statement.  

Edited February 25, 2019 by Onboard 2.0

[wildcat09 29187]

4 minutes ago, Onboard 2.0 said:

Hey why don't you just gouge out your other eye sop you can be totally blind insured of just half way there.  What an ignorant statement.  

[jimmyjazz 45512]

18 minutes ago, Onboard 2.0 said:

Hey why don't you just gouge out your other eye sop you can be totally blind insured of just half way there.  What an ignorant statement.  

Kind of early to be hitting the sauce, don't you think?

No judgment intended.

[Incredulity 11532]

13 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

Kind of early to be hitting the sauce, don't you think?

No judgment intended.

[Onboard 2.0 9083]

14 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

Kind of early to be hitting the sauce, don't you think?

No judgment intended.

Yeah cause the GOP has a stranglehold on sexual assault. 

[Js1 85055]

Nah, my brother.  Just using their congressional funds to pay off the harassments.  At least it wasn't campaign funds to fly their pets. 

[pyrohornIII 4801]

Quote

AOC Thinks Concentrated Wealth Is Incompatible With Democracy. So Did Our Founders.

 

In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville produced one of the earliest accounts of the American dream. In his famous study of the Jacksonian U.S., the Frenchman wrote that Americans possessed “the charm of anticipated success” — a ubiquitous optimism that he attributed to our country’s democratic character, and to the “general equality of condition” that prevailed among its “people.”

On Wednesday night, Sean Hannity took de Tocqueville to task. In the Fox News’ host’s telling, general economic equality is not a precondition for the American dream, but rather, an insurmountable obstacle to it — because the American dream is (apparently) to earn more than $10 million year without having to pay a top marginal tax rate higher than 37 percent.

Of course, Hannity did not actually frame his argument as a rebuke of de Tocqueville. His true target was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

After popularizing the idea of a 70 percent top marginal tax rate earlier this month, the freshman congresswoman recently suggested that the mere existence of billionaires was both immoral, and a threat to American democracy. “I do think that a system that allows billionaires to exist when there are parts of Alabama where people are still getting ringworm because they don’t have access to public health is wrong,” Ocasio-Cortez told the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, during an interview on Martin Luther King Day. One day later, the congresswoman approvingly quoted an op-ed by the economists Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, which argued that the purpose of high taxes on the wealthy wasn’t merely to generate revenue, but rather, to safeguard “democracy against oligarchy.”

Hannity’s not buying it. The Fox News host informed his audience Wednesday that Ocasio-Cortez had “called the American dream immoral,” and that she wants to “empower the government to confiscate” said dream. “Better hide your nice things,” Hannity advised his audience (whom he ostensibly believes to be composed primarily of billionaires), “because here come the excess police.”

Hannity was hardly alone in deriding AOC’s antipathy for billionaires as fundamentally un-American. But in reality, there’s nothing foreign or communistic about the idea that concentrated wealth is incompatible with democracy, or all-too compatible with mass poverty. Republicans might call such notions radical. But many of our republic’s founders would have called them common sense.

Compare AOC’s first argument — that the simultaneous existence of billionaires and poverty is immoral, and thus justifies steeply progressive taxation — with Thomas Jefferson’s reflections in 1785. During a visit to the French countryside, Jefferson found himself scandalized by “the condition of the labouring poor.” In a letter to James Madison, Jefferson wrote that the extremity of European inequality was not only morally suspect, but economically inefficient. Aristocrats had grown so wealthy, they were happy to leave their lands uncultivated, even as masses of idle workers were eager to improve it. Thus, these proto-billionaires undermined both the peasants’ ability to transcend mere subsistence, and their society’s capacity to develop economically:

 [T]he solitude of my walk led me into a train of reflections on that unequal division of property which occasions the numberless instances of wretchedness which I had observed in this country and is to be observed all over Europe. The property of this country is absolutely concentered in a very few hands…I asked myself what could be the reason that so many should be permitted to beg who are willing to work, in a country where there is a very considerable proportion of uncultivated lands? These lands are kept idle mostly for the aske of game. It should seem then that it must be because of the enormous wealth of the proprietors which places them above attention to the increase of their revenues by permitting these lands to be laboured.

Here is how Jefferson proposes to address the obscene coexistence of concentrated wealth and underemployed workers:

I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind. The descent of property of every kind therefore to all the children, or to all the brothers and sisters, or other relations in equal degree is a politic measure, and a practicable one. Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right…It is too soon yet in our country to say that every man who cannot find employment but who can find uncultivated land, shall be at liberty to cultivate it, paying a moderate rent. But it is not too soon to provide by every possible means that as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land. The small landholders are the most precious part of a state. [Emphasis mine.]

If Ocasio-Cortez’s views are un-American, then surely these words from our third president’s are, as well.

To be sure, Jefferson’s views on the propriety of wealth redistribution were hardly consistent. And, of course, the slave owner was never concerned with minimizing the number of landless African-Americans or women in the United States. What’s more, the bulk of America’s founders regarded wealth redistribution as a species of majoritarian tyranny, and designed the Constitution to guard against such despotism.

My point here isn’t to suggest that AOC is channeling the sacred wisdom of our republic’s founding racists. Rather, it’s that she’s channeling one deeply rooted strain of American thought on economic morality. And while that strain might have been marginal among the leaders of the American Revolution, it was pervasive among its foot soldiers (there’s a reason the leading propagandist of the war effort, Thomas Paine, was one of the earliest champions of an American welfare state).

Regardless, Ocasio-Cortez’s second argument against the existence of billionaires — that concentrated wealth is incompatible with genuine democracy — was something close to conventional wisdom among the founders (including those who opposed democracy).

America’s first political theorists took these truths to be self-evident: that a person could not exercise political liberty if he did not possess a modicum of economic autonomy, and that disparities in wealth inevitably produced disparities of political power.

The notion that political freedom has a material basis did not originate with Karl Marx and the creed of Communism; it was a core idea of the 17th-century British political theorist James Harrington, and his formulation of classical republicanism. A man who does not own the means of his own reproduction can never exercise political freedom, Harrington argued, because “the man that cannot live upon his own must be servant.” Likewise, the man of immense wealth — whose fortune consigns great masses of men to servitude — is inevitably a kind of tyrant. After all, “where there is inequality of estates, there must be inequality of power, and where there is inequality of power, there can be no commonwealth.”

These premises deeply informed the American founders’ conception of republican liberty. The Jeffersonian ideal of a yeoman’s republic derived from the conviction that only independent landowners were politically free — and only a (very) rough equality in the distribution of land could preserve such freedom. Even a consummate elitist like Alexander Hamilton couldn’t help but echo Harringtonian thinking, writing in the Federalist Papers, “A power over man’s subsistence amounts to a power over his will.”

Critically, relatively few of the founders saw these premises in a progressive light. To many 18th-century American elites, the fact that the propertyless lacked the capacity to exercise genuine political freedom was not an argument for giving them property, but rather, for denying them the franchise. Similarly, the notion that true democracy couldn’t coexist with wealth inequality struck many leaders of the early republic as an argument against democracy.

“Power and property may be seperated for a time, by force or fraud — but divorced never, ” Benjamin Leigh, a conservative legislator in Virginia’s House of Delegates, argued at that state’s Constitutional Convention in 1830. “For, so soon as the pang of separation is felt … property will purchase power, or power will take property.” Being a man of property, Leigh concluded that the poor should therefore be denied political rights, saying, “it does not follow that, because all men are born equal … all men may rightly claim, in an established society, equal political powers.”

Thus, Ocasio-Cortez’s belief in the moral necessity of mass democracy (and women’s suffrage, and the abolition of slavery) would have struck many a Founding Father as radical. But her insistence that true democracy is incompatible with America’s present distribution of property — in which the richest 0.1 percent of Americans command as much wealth as the poorest 90 percent — would have struck Jefferson & Co. as tautological. And a large body of political science research suggests that their shared intuition is correct.

All of which is to say: If the right to self-government is an inextricable component of the American dream, then it isn’t AOC who regards that dream as immoral — it’s Sean Hannity, and every other multimillionaire who believes that legislators should not invent “many devices for subdividing property.”

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/01/ocasio-cortez-aocs-billionaires-taxes-hannity-american-democracy.html?fbclid=IwAR1fvKkfn7jgRthqaOG7jiEWMipD0wd3kKk-lujwrARypmb1JdnTI6RXyks&utm_source=hootsuite&utm_medium=&utm_term=&utm_content=&utm_campaign=

[hpslugga 4039]

1 hour ago, mdmost said:

This is terrible. Next thing you know other Congressional staffers will get living wages and you know what that leads to, right? Anarchy.

You skipped a step. The next thing it leads to is dancing.

[achooloco 1065]

On 2/22/2019 at 8:18 PM, tjhooker said:

so the argument against adding 25K good paying jobs is property values will rise and people might have to move?  OK, sounds like a good problem to have.

Stupid take, you mad?

[RDCanecutter 26238]

1 hour ago, pyrohornIII said:

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/01/ocasio-cortez-aocs-billionaires-taxes-hannity-american-democracy.html?fbclid=IwAR1fvKkfn7jgRthqaOG7jiEWMipD0wd3kKk-lujwrARypmb1JdnTI6RXyks&utm_source=hootsuite&utm_medium=&utm_term=&utm_content=&utm_campaign=

Tom Jefferson would have liked AOC, even though at 28 she might have been a little old for him.

[ruitxn 295]

4 hours ago, EuroHorn said:

Tax payers are paying her staff a living wage...

I’d rather my tax dollars go there than to Mar-a-Lago

[jimmyjazz 45512]

9 minutes ago, RDCanecutter said:

Tom Jefferson would have liked AOC, even though at 28 she might have been a little old light-skinned for him.

Minor edit.

[workswithseed 2033]

On 2/22/2019 at 2:42 PM, tjhooker said:

This is interesting.  Quite the immediate triggered response from the collective regarding Ben Shapiro.  He must get under a lot of leftist skin.  

They hate him for being a rich Jewish man. It makes as much sense as saying we hate AOC cause she's a brown woman.

[workswithseed 2033]

On 2/22/2019 at 6:01 PM, bolverk said:

My apologies for being a few pages back, but have you ever seen how much Trump hates dogs? I'd say her dog-acceptance is most exceptional in comparison to our Emperor Tang. in his miserable mind, a dog is clearly something to be scorned.

 

 

 

"Like a dog" is a phrase we say in our family. Now its usually lying like a dog or sick as a dog, but whatver. 

[Brisketexan 104460]

What I don't get is the phrase "fired like a dog."  I mean, is that a thing?  Are there a buncha people calling Rover into the family room and saying "look, you're just not getting the job done.  We brought you on board to pose for cool family photos and stuff, but you do way too much laying around and licking your balls.  We no longer require your services, and have to let you go.  Turn in your collar, and the boys here will escort you out of the building?"

Fucking moron can't even make sense of his idioms.

Edited February 25, 2019 by Brisketexan

[workswithseed 2033]

If that dog don't hunt, you fire him like a dog!

Edited February 25, 2019 by workswithseed

[Fozzz 152]

This is well put (re her comments on Venezuela).

 

 

[Biff Tannen 45476]

Fozzz is one of the weirder posters in the CR these days.

[Bash Riprock 1695]

On 2/22/2019 at 2:53 PM, David Dennison said:

Why on earth would anyone debate Ben Shapiro? That's a complete waste of time.

that's fine if she doesn't want to debate him. but to label it as 'catcalling'? LOL. what a stupid human being. 

[TwiceHorn 31184]

On 2/22/2019 at 2:14 PM, tucker said:

But they wouldn't have collected almost any tax dollars from Amazon which was the issue. Additionally, the terms allowed AMZN to change the agreement at will anytime. It was a bad deal. Cities like NYC do not need to give incentives to companies. Foxconn is the perfect example of what happens when politicians provide tax give aways to companies.  

I'm not sure Foxconn is a good example of anything, except perhaps an absolutely rapacious, amoral company with a decidedly Asian approach to business and contracts.  Making any kind of deal with Foxconn is almost assured to end badly if it requires Foxconn to adhere to terms of an agreement.

[Hank Kingsley 20634]

1 hour ago, workswithseed said:

They hate him for being a rich Jewish man. It makes as much sense as saying we hate AOC cause she's a brown woman.

Lulz. Ben Shapiro is just another grifter taking advantage of the Trump era.  

 

 

[David Dennison 18601]

1 hour ago, workswithseed said:

They hate him for being a rich Jewish man. It makes as much sense as saying we hate AOC cause she's a brown woman.

No one hates him for being a rich Jewish man.

Is he rich? Who cares?

He's a twat with terrible takes.

[hpslugga 4039]

5 minutes ago, Hank Kingsley said:

Lulz. Ben Shapiro is just another grifter taking advantage of the Trump era.  

 

 

Seriously, if Ben Shapiro had said something worth a shit in his public life, I would have remembered it.

[Dahobbs 17420]

19 minutes ago, Bash Riprock said:

that's fine if she doesn't want to debate him. but to label it as 'catcalling'? LOL. what a stupid human being. 

You mean Shapiro, right?

[workswithseed 2033]

25 minutes ago, David Dennison said:

No one hates him for being a rich Jewish man.

Is he rich? Who cares?

He's a twat with terrible takes.

He designates liberals with facts and logic beams that come out of his menancing glare. 

Afterwards he tweets "Ok, that was epic" to AOC which she laughs as she only see that socialism wins again against her catcalling opponents. Plus she thinks that in 12 years he'll be kissing at her feet as she saves him and other republicans by throwing money down the drain where all our precious clean water is going to prevent is from becoming a large nation of desert. 

 

 

Edited February 25, 2019 by workswithseed

[jimmyjazz 45512]

41 minutes ago, Bash Riprock said:

that's fine if she doesn't want to debate him. but to label it as 'catcalling'? LOL. what a stupid human being. 

Your outrage is duly noted, and appropriately muted in light of far more egregious verbiage spewing from Donald Trump's mouth on a daily basis.

Oh wait, that's not true.  You don't give a fuck about exaggeration or offensive language, except when it comes from the left.

[Dahobbs 17420]

6 minutes ago, workswithseed said:

He designates liberals with facts and logic beams that come out of his menancing glare. 

Afterwards he tweets "Ok, that was epic" to AOC which she laughs as she only see that socialism wins again against her catcalling opponents. Plus she thinks that in 12 years he'll be kissing at her feet as she saves him and other republicans by throwing money down the drain where all our precious clean water is going to prevent is from becoming a large nation of desert. 

 

 

Yeah, this rant is about as coherent as anything Shapiro has ever said. Thank you for illustrating the point. 

[Brisketexan 104460]

2 minutes ago, Dahobbs said:

Yeah, this rant is about as coherent as anything Shapiro has ever said. Thank you for illustrating the point. 

The state of "the intellectual right" is one of the most amazing things to come out of the last few years of insanity.  Ben Shapiro.  Charlie Kirk.  Candace Owens.  Diamond and Silk.  Lara Loomer.

Jesus Christ, in any sane world, the ENTIRE NATION would be laughing at these clowns.  Instead, the "right" has completely run off folks like George Will in favor of that murderers row of dipshittery.

[Hugo Stiglitz 23356]

1 minute ago, Brisketexan said:

The state of "the intellectual right" is one of the most amazing things to come out of the last few years of insanity.  Ben Shapiro.  Charlie Kirk.  Candace Owens.  Diamond and Silk.  Lara Loomer.

Jesus Christ, in any sane world, the ENTIRE NATION would be laughing at these clowns.  Instead, the "right" has completely run off folks like George Will in favor of that murderers row of dipshittery.

You’re just biased against morons.  

[Brisketexan 104460]

4 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

You’re just biased against morons.  

[MaybeACoordinator 8349]

1 hour ago, Biff Tannen said:

Fozzz is one of the weirder posters in the CR these days.

Everything you thought you knew is wrong, man. Who knows the truth? The real truth? Only the Fozzz, dude. 

[RDCanecutter 26238]

2 hours ago, Biff Tannen said:

Fozzz is one of the weirder posters in the CR these days.

Weirdness is not one poster. Weirdness is the collective. The Surly's weirdness is as if you opened up a bee hive, and all the bees had started wearing shells, as if they were hermit crabs. But those weren't shells, they were little Lego people heads the bees were wearing on their own heads, And you reach your gloved hand in the hive to lift out one Lego-head-wearing bee, and you see that it started as a Lego head, but the bees have altered it to look like a portrait of your great-grandmother who passed away when you were three. And all the bee's Lego-heads have your great-grandmother's face, she is smiling at you, and the bees are humming, and forming a pattern, a pattern that starts to make sense...

Edited February 26, 2019 by RDCanecutter

[David Dennison 18601]

1 hour ago, workswithseed said:

He designates liberals with facts and logic beams that come out of his menancing glare. 

Afterwards he tweets "Ok, that was epic" to AOC which she laughs as she only see that socialism wins again against her catcalling opponents. Plus she thinks that in 12 years he'll be kissing at her feet as she saves him and other republicans by throwing money down the drain where all our precious clean water is going to prevent is from becoming a large nation of desert. 

He does nothing of the sort. He spins.

[Biff Tannen 45476]

10 minutes ago, RDCanecutter said:

Weirdness is not one poster. Weirdness is the collective. The Surly's weirdness is as if you opened up a bee hive, and all the bees had started wearing shells, as if they were hermit crabs. But those weren't shells, they were little Lego people heads the bees were wearing on their own heads, And you reach your gloved hand in the hive to lift out one Lego-head-wearing bee, and you see that it started as a Lego head, but the bees have altered it to look like a portrait of your great-grandmother who passed away when you were three. And all the bee's Lego-heads have your great-grandmother's face, she is smiling at you, and the bees are humming, and forming a pattern, a pattern that starts to make sense...