Democratic (Party) Direction

Simon I'd be curious to hear more about universal services over here:

Basic income

I don't have an interest in the nuance, I want to not work, that's all really. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

see for ex The False Promise of UBI which takes Andy Stern (!) to task for UBI advocacy before coming around to:

The left hasn’t seriously organized around welfare rights for years. But in the coming years it will be more important than ever to defend what remains of U.S. social provision from Paul Ryan and company, particularly given the nasty racial tack that fight will undoubtedly take. And we can’t defend welfare just as a backstop for vulnerable and unlucky members of society, or as a handout to the benighted poor, but as a fundamental and universal good for all. In other words, we should advocate for the exact opposite of the Clintonian welfare reform programs of the 1990s, and the only kind of welfare program that can build a broad and universal constituency for social provision rather than marking out the undeserving poor.

A recent New York Times op-ed argued for UBI as a kind of reparations for decades of unpaid work done by women, echoing socialist-feminist arguments about the value of social reproduction. The Movement for Black Lives endorsed basic income as part of a reparations program, in the model of a new Freedom Budget. The labor movement in the United States has understandably focused on higher wages, but it can—and must—also revive the demand for shorter hours and more leisure. Basic income isn’t the only way to make that demand, and it isn’t even a necessary part of it—but its utopian elements can help drive a more visionary agenda for labor.

compare to The Wrong Kind of UBI:

While the idea of a basic income as an egalitarian reform can be traced back to Thomas Paine, interest in the policy has picked up in the last few decades. Belgian philosopher and economist Philippe van Parijs, for example, sees in the basic income the possibility for a “capitalist road to communism” — a strategy for leaping over socialism (understood as collective workers’ ownership of the means of production) and moving directly to communism (“from each according to her abilities to each according to her needs”).

In recent years, a UBI has been embraced in particular by the post-productivist left, which carries a strong feminist and ecological bent and rejects the traditional left’s valorization of labor and the working class.

For example, feminist theorist Kathi Weeks identifies a basic income as the linchpin of a “postwork political project,” which regards the minimization of work as the key to an emancipatory society. Her case for a UBI comes from the perspective of social reproduction feminism. In capitalism, socially reproductive labor within households is largely uncompensated, and still overwhelmingly performed by women; by severing the connection between income and activities designated as “work,” Weeks writes, a basic income “highlights the arbitrariness of which practices are waged and which are not.”

By shortening working hours, a basic income expands the realm of freedom and encroaches upon the realm of necessity, taking us closer to a society where we can hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, criticize in the evening, and wash dishes after dinner. Furthermore, a UBI generates more hospitable conditions for social movements, freeing up time and energy and creating “a kind of unconditional and inexhaustible strike fund,” as the Marxist sociologist Erik Olin Wright puts it.

More free time can also enable more ecologically sustainable lifestyles, replacing capitalist production with leisure.

i dont remember what No Labels is

tell me abt Bustos

damn she's good

Say it again for the people in the Senate https://t.co/4Qr0EsoGfQ

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) November 29, 2018

https://i.imgur.com/QONVIyz.gif

i am annoyed as f that she can't run in 2020. maybe she can primary schumer

^^ this, i think, is legit the move

that would be so sweet

is Schumer up for re-election in 2020?

cuz if so I can almost kinda see it happening. although it seems there are always more conservative/biz-oriented capitalist assholes in NY state than one would think

He is not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_Senate_elections#New_York

My rep, Schrader (D-Or), was one of the blue dog fools who signed that open letter opposing Pelosi. I had considered phoning his three offices to heap scorn on him, but my wife beat me to it. So, I just snail-mailed his local office an earnest old-person letter, written longhand on lined legal pad paper, in which I scolded him severely in earnest old person language.

I composed it on the computer, but I thought that longhand would attract more attention and worry them more.

and worry them more.

but was it stained with bodily fluids?

No blood, sweat, or tears were shed in the making of that letter and I'll be damned if I would ever jack off for Kurt Effing Schrader. Mucus is the only bodily fluid yet unnamed and nope, I withheld.

puss? earwax?

I've been bottling my lymph and sending it to my representatives for years

I'm pretty much ALWAYS suspicious of UBI guys. If you can push for any formulation of universal income, you might as well push instead for its vastly superior cousin, universal services.

― resident hack (Simon H.),

what are universal services? I dont have a horse in the UBI race, but w something like this is maybe pushing for the lesser rather than the superior a start?

I think he's got a lot of borrowed good ideas (Medicare for All! Let's modernize uh timebanking fuck it why not) to sit alongside his main UBI hobbyhorse, but he's also totally got the flavor of a Silicon Valley Democrat. A lot of focus on ""innovating"" our way out of a variety of complex problems (free, uh, marriage counseling for everyone! find. . . new uses for shut down malls? we're gonna geoengineer the shit out of climate change) and that always gives me pause because it allows space for shitty ideas in the name of eclecticism.

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, T

Which likely candidates do you prefer at this stage? not in terms of electability, just seeing where someone like this might sit with you

Universal services means everybody gets access. You don’t do means-testing or try to divide people into who is more deserving and who ain’t.

would also like to read the definitive UBI takedown if one exists

As HOOS talks about upthread, I don't think there's a definitive takedown possible, as there are a lot of different formulations of UBI.

re: UBS, they got a whole website: https://universalbasicservices.org

give 'em hell, nancy

https://www.democraticleader.gov/newsroom/112918-3/

Great thread on the Green New Deal / Climate Marshal Plan framing:

So many people I've talked to in DC over the last week have said some version of this: "The 10 year timeline to reverse climate change and create millions of jobs seems like a great organizing tactic. But let's talk about what's actually possible." Let's talk about that.

— Saikat Chakrabarti (@saikatc) November 30, 2018

nice

In my on-boarding to Congress, I get to pick my insurance plan.

As a waitress, I had to pay more than TWICE what I’d pay as a member of Congress.

It’s frustrating that Congressmembers would deny other people affordability that they themselves enjoy. Time for #MedicareForAll.

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) December 1, 2018

she's running

not if she keeps using "on-boarding" in casual conversation

this is why we lost, alfred

Jayapal is so consistently active and effective it blows my mind.

I was able to successfully assist 5 asylum seekers - 2 unaccompanied minors, a mother and her 9 year old child, and a young man with a serious medical condition - into the United States.

— Rep. Pramila Jayapal (@RepJayapal) December 2, 2018

We have some questions about Donald Trump's cozy relationship with Russia. https://t.co/N6ySNILYMx

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) August 15, 2016

Alfred what is the proper thing to say other than “on-boarding”

I mean "bringing on" or something like that is less corporatespeaky but she's not campaigning so WGAF how she says it, is my feeling

i think that's what all HR type people say now so it's probably impossible to start a job without people telling you they're onboarding you all the time

always used to be 'orientation'

never heard "onboarding" til my latest permatemp gig

(where the pay sucks)

Tbf it's more than orientation. orientation is telling you what you need to know. Onboarding (ugh) is also getting benefits set up, badging, tax forms, etc.

a spicy take from Jacobin: Beto shouldn't run.. (The basic thesis: Beto represents for liberals a chance to reset to the pre-Trump era; Marcetic argues this is neither possible nor desirable.) It goes into his actual voting record more than any other piece I've seen.

O’Rourke has a decent record, but it’s not exactly spotless. He failed to get the AFL-CIO’s endorsement in his race against Cruz because of his vote to give Obama the power to fast-track the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, lamely arguing that Obama would negotiate a more progressive deal than a Republican (he of course didn’t). This technically puts him to the right of both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump on the issue. (He’s since voiced support for Trump’s NAFTA renegotiation.)

O’Rourke has also been curiously active in trying to chip away at the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. He voted to weaken the law in 2015, changed his mind when a delay on the Volcker Rule was inserted into the bill he voted for, then voted to weaken that same rule three years later anyway. He also voted to exempt certain non-bank financial institutions, such as mutual funds, from stress tests required under the law, a step supported by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), a trade group for banks, securities firms, and asset management firms.

This bill was just one of a series of fifteen bills put forward this year by the Republican-controlled House Financial Services Committee as part of a stealth attempt to pass last year’s failed Dodd-Frank-gutting bill, the Financial CHOICE Act (which O’Rourke had voted against), by breaking it up into smaller pieces. He did vote against three others brought to the floor.

SIFMA and the American Bankers Association likewise supported the Financial Institutions Examination Fairness and Reform Act, another bill O’Rourke voted for, this one making it easier for financial institutions to appeal regulators’ decisions. He’s also voted to triple the size of institutions eligible to be considered small bank holding companies, and so qualify to hold higher levels of risky debt; and he voted to create an unelected oversight board with broad powers to restructure Puerto Rico’s debt, which cut pension benefits for the island’s residents last year, cut the minimum wage, and wants to slash its budget by a third. It’s votes like these that have given him one of the better US Chamber of Commerce voting scores among Democrats.

Pramilaaaaaa

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/12/03/a-new-moral-imagination-on-immigration/

^^saw that, good shit.

Alfred what is the proper thing to say other than “on-boarding”

― crüt,

"brainwashing"

"attending to the administrative matters pursuant to starting a new job"

a lot of talk about the positive economic impacts of immigration, and the need to fight against the perception that leftists want 'open borders', for a piece about 'a new moral imagination on immigration'.
ctrl-f climate: 0 results

I do want open borders though

(also want to take away everybody's guns fwiw, and have sky-high taxes and universal healthcare)

same but this is one policy position where I am not going to be all that disgruntled that my rep doesn't share (or at least doesn't advocate) my position.

Maybe I'll write her though.

Shakey otm

Remember TPP?

I do want open borders though

― Οὖτις, Monday, December 3, 2018

we need to onboard those migrants imo

"...Don't ya'll have jobs to do?" AOC is sooooo good.

This thread (only 2 tweets long, don't worry) is really good, and an interesting revelation:

This week I went to dive spot in DC for some late night food. I chatted up the staff.

SEVERAL bartenders, managers, & servers *currently worked in Senate + House offices.*

This is a disgrace. Congress of ALL places should raise MRAs so we can pay staff an actual DC living wage.

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) December 3, 2018

hoo boy

Joe Biden: "I think I am the most qualified person in the country to be president" https://t.co/TZdhneEqeX pic.twitter.com/oYWS2HGYZI

— The Hill (@thehill) December 4, 2018