Ocasio-Cortez calls for a 21st Century New Deal to correct massive wealth transfers of 2008

Update: Visit the Ocasio2018 website to learn about AOC’s stance on other important issues:

It’s Time for a Political Revolution-  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is running for Congress to create an America that works for all of us—not just the wealthiest few.

On twitter, she is @Ocasio2018.  Her bio reads:  “(D) for US Congress, NY-14: Bronx + Queens. There are candidates like me everywhere: http://justicedemocrats.com/candidates.  REGISTER TO VOTE Nov 6th!”

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The 2008 crisis represented one of the largest wealth transfers in American history.Across industries, experts now admit what we‘ve long known: that Wall St gamblers were protected and working people were abandoned.It’s time for a 21st-Century New Deal.https://t.co/04g7GkkMWG

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) August 6, 2018

Ten Years After the Crash, We Are Still Living in the World It Brutally Remade (nymag.com)

Sometimes you don’t know how deep the hole is until you try to fill it. In 2009, staring down what looked to anyone with a calculator like the biggest financial crisis since 1929, the federal government poured $830 billion into the economy — a spending stimulus bigger, by some measures, than the entire New Deal — and the country barely noticed.

It registered the crisis, though. The generation that came of age in the Great Depression was indelibly shaped by that experience of deprivation, even though what followed was what Henry Luce famously called, in 1941, “the American Century.” He meant the 20th, and, to judge from our present politics, at least — “Make America Great Again” on one side of the aisle; on the other, the suspicion that the president is a political suicide bomber, destroying the pillars of government — he probably wouldn’t have made the same declaration about the 21st. A decade now after the beginning of what has come to be called the Great Recession, and almost as long since economic growth began to tick upward and unemployment downward, the cultural and psychological imprint left by the financial crisis looks as profound as the ones left by the calamity that struck our grandparents. All the more when you look beyond the narrow economic data: at a new radical politics on both left and right; at a strident, ideological pop culture obsessed with various apocalypses; at an internet powered by envy, strife, and endless entrepreneurial hustle; at opiates and suicides and low birthrates; and at the resentment, racial and gendered and otherwise, by those who felt especially left behind. Here, we cast a look back, and tried to take a seismic reading of the financial earthquake and its aftershocks, including those that still jolt us today.

The link that Ocasio-Cortez recommends in her tweet is a composite piece constructed from the work of many individuals, including the following:

AMERICA STOPPED BELIEVING IN THE AMERICAN DREAM

By Frank Rich

WTF HAPPENED?

Sheila Bair Former head of FDIC

Corey Robin Political theorist

Robert Shiller Economist

Matt Bruenig Policy analyst

Yves Smith Founder, naked capitalism

and more …

THE MARKET WAS REVEALED AS A CASINO

By Christopher Caldwell

THE CENTER COLLAPSED, BUT A NEW UTOPIANISM FOLLOWED

By Timothy Shenk

MEN FELT PUNISHED

By Hanna Rosin

WOMEN GOT HIT TOO, AND INVENTED A NEW FEMINISM

By Rachael Combe

MILLENNIALS BECAME SOCIALISTS

By Malcolm Harris

THE RICH GOT RICHER

By James D. Walsh

AND, OF COURSE, BANKS SURVIVED

The series is not complete at this point, future contributions are currently scheduled:

Check back throughout the week for more from our 2008 series, including Andrew Sullivan on how Jeremy Corbyn become the face of the New New Left and extended interviews with several of the subjects featured here.