This news just broke.
The fourth-ranking Democrat in the House has lost his bid for another term: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old activist who ran on abolishing ICE and making Medicare a universal program, defeated Rep. Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.) in an upset.
…Ocasio-Cortez argued that the increasingly non-white district, which stretches from the Bronx to Queens, had been represented too long by a figure from the local political machine.
…
Ocasio-Cortez told voters that they could do better — she refused corporate PAC money, emphasizing that most of the $300,709 she’d raised for the campaign came from small donors, most of them from in and around the district.
She not only won, she won by a whopping 57.6-42.4% margin.
I wrote about Ocasio-Cortez’s insurgent campaign against the Wall Street friendly Crowley before. For a young progressive Latina to beat an entrenched incumbent who was fourth highest in the party leadership is a huge upset. I hope the party leaders learn a lesson from this.
I hope the lesson the party leaders learn isn’t to work harder to bury candidates like Ocasio-Cortez. And I hope for a pony for Christmas.
With primary season in full swing, I see more and more references to “Wall Street.” I have always used that term to mean “the financial services sector of the economy.”
From context, I think I might be in the minority with my definition. Is it publicly traded corporations? All businesses? Capitalism in general? What do Mano, and the other regular readers mean when they refer to Wall Street?
They won’t. The ‘lesson’ they’ll learn instead is that Bernie Sanders ruined everything by bringing progrssive principles into the national conversation.
#2
I believe it has come to encompass large corporations as well as the strictly financial services meaning, due to them being traded on Wall Street and thus heavily entangled with the financial services. Plus, they are both positioned against the needs of the average voter, and so fighting against one to remove money from politics means fighting both.
Jackson @#2,
When I say Wall Street I mean (like you) primarily finance capitalism represented by the big investment banks, which has become the dominant factor in the US economy. But as Holms says, in recent times with the loosening of the restrictions on the activities of banks, it has become hard to separate the big investment banks from other business sectors.