Comments by "Jeremy Barlow" (@jeremybarlow2291) on "AOC Blows Anderson Cooper’s Mind With Popular Solutions" video.

“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.” JFK said that on Sept. 12, 1962. In February of the same year the USA had put John Glenn on a rocket and sent him orbiting around the earth 3 times. That was the first time we had successfully orbited the earth. Less than 7 years after Pres. Kennedy’s speech we landed two human beings on the surface of a foreign planet , the moon- for the first time in July 20, 1969. We did that not because it was necessary, but because we just decided to go. In October of 1939 Alexander Sachs met with President Roosevelt to discuss Einstein and Leo Szilard’s letter about that atomic bomb and the need to build one. No one has ever even refined uranium or causes a chain reaction controlled or otherwise with the material at that point anywhere on earth. It was theory. At that time most of Europe and Asia were already at war. Most people thought the US would be drawn into the conflict and many believed that Hitler was developing the weapon as Heisenberg the leading nuclear physicist on the planet was in Nazi Germany. While Heisenberg was working on a bomb the entirety of teams working on the bomb in Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union included 11 human beings in total. The American physicists were correct about how powerful the weapon would be if it were created. What they hadn’t thought about was the consequences anyone who would have convinced Hitler or Stalin to invest in such a weapon and failed to deliver would have suffered. 120,000 people went to work on the bomb project in the US, Canada, and the United Kingdom and on July 16, 1945 the trinity test in Almagordo was a success. These projects were impossibilities. We didn’t know how to achieve them. We didn’t have the technical know how, merely the will to succeed and we achieved those goals in a matter of less than 6 years for the A-Bomb and 7 years for the moon landing. The bomb was arguably a necessity in the minds of the scientists building it because if the Nazi’s had built one first the world would have been decimated. The moon shot was just a whim. Anyone who thinks that we cannot achieve a goal we know how to meet technologically, we don’t need to create new tech- and do so in 12 years also missed the entirety of the New Deal era which in less than 12 years gave all of rural America electricity for example. We know how to go 100% green. We have the technology. We have the resources. We simply need the political and economic will to do it. We could easily accomplish this goal in 5 years if we decide to do it.
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Chadillac They don’t have to be powered by coal. They aren’t in Germany. They aren’t in France. BLM owns 245 million acres of empty land that is essentially worthless except for the fact that most of it is in a desert. Hmmm deserts get plenty of sunshine.
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Chadillac regenerative braking now saves the NYC Transit system 400 megawatt hours per year. One of the power plants for the transit system provides 104 megawatts of power. A wind farm near my house has 192 megawatts of installed capacity. The largest US solar farm is 400 megawatts of installed capacity. These are comparable to the 10 plants that power the NYC transit system. There is a 2 gigawatt solar plant in India, as well as a 1 gigawatt solar plant. There is a 580 megawatt solar farm in Morroco, a 648 megawatt solar farm in India, and an 850 megawatt solar farm in China.
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Ant Man we have battery tech for grid level storage readily available at current market costs. We can build plants to allow for grid level storage batteries to be made. We have the solar hot water, and geothermal heating and cooling tech to replace fossil fuels for heating and AC. We have the technology to do solar and wind. We have the batter storage. Most studies say it would cost about $1.5 Trillion to go Green, not $30 Trillion. Electric cars are commercially viable today. We have the battery tech, and with the current grid it is not hard to add more fast charging stations. We also have cultured meats that are ready to commercially replace slaughtered meats within the next 3 years. We have 12 years and the tech to do what needs to be done.
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Terminal Insanity no it is not immoral to trade labor and services so long as you own the fruits of the deal. What is immoral is capitalism. The theft of the fruits of labor that is required for anyone to earn $10 million in a year -with limited exceptions, is the problem. 99.95% of individuals or businesses earning $10 million or more do so because they have stolen the value of someone else’s labor. Rare exceptions might include someone like JK Rowling, Tom Cruise, or Lebron James whose unique talents and abilities create excess value. There is no excess value that Tim Cook is creating. There might be an excess value that a Jonas Salk creates, but again that is less than 1% of the people who fall into that category. And the funny thing is most of them understand that an exceptional amount of luck is part of that equation, and they typically give away most of their earnings.
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Terminal Insanity will anyone other than you provide labor in this business? Why does “starting the business” mean you are entitled to more of the fruits of those other’s labor than they are entitled to receive? Historically “capital resources” have been paid a 4% rate of return, so if you are saying that the money invested deserves a higher rate of return than the labor necessary to make the capital productive please explain why! You begin from a set of assumptions that I find morally repugnant as morally repugnant as slavery. Wage slavery and slavery are equivalents in my mind. Even the most successful company in history with the highest profit margins, Apple would only provide about $400,000 in income per employee if it were a worker owned company and since you claim that laborers should be allowed to traded their services and labor freely and the only form of ownership which allows that is the worker cooperative that would lead me to believe you must have an idea for a company with profit margins that make Apple look like a pittance. Either that or you are a thief who refuses to see their theft.
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Whytebio if the wealthy are paying 87% of the taxes -which they aren’t it is 40% and actually much less when property taxes, sales taxes, state fees, and the tax on labor is factored, more like 26% of the taxes then despite the top 5% owning and controlling 85% of the assets in the country then taxes are too low because the wealthy have a privilege that the working class does not enjoy, a control over their taxes and when they are paid. The majority of income to the wealthy is untaxed entirely in the form of unrecognized capital gains. Most of the $150 billion that Jeff Bezos has is the result of a 0% tax rate on unrecognized capital gains. When the tax rates were higher in the 1950s- 1970s there was an incentive to hire new sales people and new R&D people an borrow to build a new plant and buy new equipment and pay interest on loans to grow the productivity of a company because you could either internalize the gains by letting money you would otherwise pay in taxes be written off as a deductible expense that grew and strengthened your business, or you could pay the taxes. When the rate is 70 to 93 percent you take the deductions and grow your business to create untaxed and unrecognized capital gains. When the tax code is as it is written today, you pay the taxes and buy back stock to artificially inflate the value of stock options created out of thin air for insider executives and as long inflate the value of stock for key insider investors and hedge fund buddies who will manipulate the price to fleece the pension funds of the working class invested via mutual funds because the tax rates favor paper gains over genuine growth and the consumer class’s disintegration. Choose your path. One created a vibrant middle class the other destroyed a vibrant middle class.
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Terminal Insanity you have nothing to eat, you must work to earn money to be able to eat. That is called coercion, not a choice. There is no freedom in a capitalist society. There is wage slavery and ownership.
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Terminal Insanity we don’t see co-ops because capitalists cannot exploit their workers. As only .08% of businesses co-ops account for more than and about $135.5 billion of GDP and have a ten year survival rate 3x that of capitalist enterprises, they do work. THOSE ARE FACTS. The economic system is structured to disfavor that business model as a matter of law and the banks which currently control lending disfavor that form of ownership as a matter of fact because of their structure. The securities laws make capitalization of consumer owned or hybrid consumer and worker owned cooperative enterprise more difficult to capitalize than corporate forms of enterprise and that is yet another fact. Despite these facts there are roughly 22,000 cooperatives in the US with about $3 Trillion of assets. There are 27 million businesses in the US and less than 1% are cooperatives because of systemic impediments to a superior business model.
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