Vinit Pakhale

"If you have billions and you argue against paying a slight marginal tax increase — you might be an asshole"

A schoolbus, stopping in front of a residential home, is rear ended by a full size truck that doesn’t slow down at all. Head on a swivel, gang.

Seattle has one of the worst housing crises in the country. I see it every time I’m home in my district. People working full-time jobs who can’t afford rent. Teachers, nurses, and transit workers who can’t live in the city they serve. Families on housing assistance waiting lists that have been frozen for years. This is a policy failure, not an inevitability. We built this crisis by choosing developers over people. We can choose differently. Housing is a human right. We fight for it like one.

The first signs are here: Butter Chicken Dumplings

Someone can certainly *make* a billion dollars. That’s not the same thing as earning. Growing fast and disrupting markets also often means chasing and wielding market power, political influence, and scale. Take Airbnb. They heavily lobby politicians against passing housing laws to protect working class residents because it’s bad for their business model. Airbnb could not exist at its current scale and size without the housing market destabilizations, displacements, and exploits that are supercharging the evictions of working people everywhere from Puerto Rico to Jackson Hole. Now young people are planning for a future where they will never be able to afford to own a home while others have 20 and live off renting it out to them at extortionate rates with zero protections. Yes, a tiny amount of people can make billions of dollars doing that. And millions of everyday Americans are bearing the cost.

The question "does Israel have a right to exist?" has only ever been asked in bad faith but "no" falls into the trap. The best answer remains Zohran's last year--"yes" but (replying to the inevitable followup) as a "state of equal rights" not an ethnosupremacist "Jewish state."

To not have a single left representation in a country with such an abundant labour force and youth population is horrifying.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: You can't earn a billion dollars. Ilana Glazer: That's right. AOC: You just can't earn that. Glazer: That's exactly correct. AOC: You can get market power. You can break rules. You can do all sorts of things. You can abuse labor laws. Glazer: Yup. AOC: You can pay people less than what they're worth. Glazer: Yup. AOC: But you can't earn that, right? Glazer: That's right. AOC: And so you have to create a myth that -- since you didn't earn that, you have to create a myth of earning it.

I’m still reading (10 years later) “Bernie would have won” and I swear, that guy was the greatest weapon Russia unleashed upon us.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: You can't earn a billion dollars. Ilana Glazer: That's right. AOC: You just can't earn that. Glazer: That's exactly correct. AOC: You can get market power. You can break rules. You can do all sorts of things. You can abuse labor laws. Glazer: Yup. AOC: You can pay people less than what they're worth. Glazer: Yup. AOC: But you can't earn that, right? Glazer: That's right. AOC: And so you have to create a myth that -- since you didn't earn that, you have to create a myth of earning it.