okaydo said:tequila4kapp said:
Ds in America's biggest city elect a Socialist. Everyday Ds everywhere keep saying the party is not moving left.
Americans also elected Obama, a socialist, to the presidency.
Obama campaigned as a Democratic Socialist in 2008. However, as you'll recall, he governed as a Neoliberal / moderate Republican. His economic team was chosen by Citigroup, and as soon as he was inaugurated, he was all Wall Street, writing huuge bailout checks to... Citigroup & the biggest banks.
Bill Clinton played the same game -- ran as a Progressive (remember the Covenant With America?), and governed as a deregulating, ending-welfare-as-we-know-it Republican.
What politicians like Zohran Mamdami, AOC, & Bernie Sanders are proposing is simply a return to the brilliant economic policies of the New Deal -- the policies that Made America Great.
Before FDR took office in 1933, we had the normal boom/bust cycles of unregulated Capitalism, with a financial crisis or bank failures every 7 to 15 years.
Under FDR, we invested in education & infrastructure, had regulated banking, steady growth, were the world's biggest manufacturer, and the world's biggest creditor, we had NO financial crises, our standard of living was among the highest in the world, and we led the world in social mobility.
Then, in the 1970s, both parties set out to end all the successful New Deal policies. They rolled back the New Deal regulations, lowered taxes, eased anti-trust enforcement, and set out to help large corporations increase their earnings -- at the expense of Workers. We now have 60% of Americans living paycheck-to-paycheck, and 50% of American who can't afford a $400 emergency expense.
New Deal policies: High wages, low cost of living;
Neoliberal / 'Trickle-down' policies: Low wages, high cost of living.
New Deal / Democratic Socialist policies are economically moderate, in the sense that they represent a fairly even balance between the economic & political power of Capital & Labor. Bernie Sanders, AOC, & Zohran are economic moderates. Conservatives and even "moderate" Democrats are Milton Friedman Neoliberals, at the extreme economic Right.
There are a lot of people who want OUR tax dollars spent on US, and NOT on corporate welfare, tax cuts, gov't subsidies, bank / private equity / hedge fund bailouts, regime-change wars & genocide.
