---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Tom Atlee <[email protected]> Date: Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 7:38 PM Subject: A major politician advocating the sharing economy To: Michel Bauwens <[email protected]>, Janelle Orsi < [email protected]> I don't know if Cory Booker is transformational or transitional - since the NYT can only see him through the old lenses - but he is the first leading U.S. politician I've heard advocating the sharing economy. - Tom Begin forwarded message: *From: *"Rick Ingrasci M.D." <[email protected]> *Date: *March 22, 2013 9:08:07 AM PDT *To: *Invitational <[email protected]>, Hnet < [email protected]>, Natcap <[email protected]> *Subject: **[Invit] A Politician From the Future* [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/> ------------------------------ March 22, 2013 **A Politician From the Future** ** By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/anand_giridharadas/index.html> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/23/us/23iht-letter23.html?smid=tw-share4&_r=0 ** ** ** ** Cory A. Booker is hoping to be the next U.S. senator from New Jersey. But the constituency he seems keenest to represent is the future itself. Perhaps more than any prominent American politician, Mr. Booker — the 43-year-old Democrat and mayor of the rust-coated, luck-starved city of Newark — has cultivated his brand as a leader of, by and for a new era. He tweets with something approaching the frequency of his own heartbeat, so much that his staff calls Twitter his girlfriend. He meditates. He balances old-school talk of God with new-age ideas of being “open to what the universe brings me.” He champions Big Data and knows how many consumer impressions he got last week. He gushes over what may be called the hipster economy: using technology to rent out bedrooms, borrow vacuum cleaners, share cars and raise seed capital. Educated at Stanford, Oxford and Yale, Mr. Booker is a model of self-propelled ascent in a postindustrial city where rises like his have grown ever rarer. In conversation, he might cite the writers James Baldwin and Langston Hughes; Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction; the business book “Built to Last”; ancient Roman history; and an African proverb about going fast alone but far together. Owing in part to the gap between his own sophistication and the travails of the city he has led since 2006, he has endured ceaseless speculation about whether Newark is merely a steppingstone. Now, as he turns his attention to a U.S. Senate race in 2014, the more interesting question may be whether a self-styled politician from the future can make it to the Washington of right now — and what a city of marble, pearls and power ties might make of him. Even as the Republican Party undergoes a time of soul-searching, self-flagellation and contestation, Mr. Booker’s emergence hints at schisms to come among Democrats. He represents the Googly-Facebookish wing of the party — liberal as ever in its views on issues like same-sex marriage<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/same_sex_marriage/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>and abortion rights, but more libertarian than the old guard on economics, more trusting of markets than unions to improve lives, more reliant on the business jargon of “synergy” and “scale” than the language of activism and justice. Mr. Booker sounds like a new kind of Democrat, for example, when he says that running Newark has made him trust data more than his own liberal principles on the issue of reducing gun violence. When the Supreme Court struck down Washington’s gun ban in 2008, Mr. Booker’s initial reaction was horror: To allow handgun sales in an urban area was to tempt disaster. Then he sought data from his staff, and they challenged him: “We just did a quick look at all the shootings in my city and saw that nobody who legally went out and bought a handgun was involved in shootings.” “Here I would have gotten emotionally, politically charged up about a Supreme Court decision, but the data didn’t hold that,” he continued in a recent interview. “So I’ve become much more loyal to big data.” This is a strain of pragmatism that is different from what President Barack Obama ran on in 2008. It is less about coming together despite our differences, less about transcendence and more about thinking the way businesses do: doing the right thing, where the right thing is defined as what the spreadsheet shows. “The issue is not finding the answers,” Mr. Booker says. “It’s just growing them to scale.” On certain issues, as when speaking of same-sex marriage, Mr. Booker’s language retains the timbre of activism. “The story of America is this country founded in perfect ideals,” he said, but in “a savagely imperfect time.” The American project, in his estimation, is to close the gap between ideals and lived reality. But when Mr. Booker discusses the overwhelmingly poor, minority community he serves, talk of justice recedes behind talk of creating opportunity. He grew most excited in an hourlong conversation about so-called “collaborative consumption,” the spreading practice of renting, sharing and bartering things, like a bike or a spare bedroom, rather than owning them outright. Many in government have been wary of services like Airbnb, which, in allowing people to earn money renting out rooms, diverts funds from tax-paying, unionized, regulated hotels — as do similar services in transportation, finance and other spheres. But Mr. Booker believes such services give the less fortunate the chance to make ends meet without waiting for the return of union jobs that may never come back. “It’s actually helping all of us to enter a world of entrepreneurial interaction in a way that is so democratic,” he said. The mayor’s enthusiasm is not only a challenge to the regulatory state that his party has long championed. It also agitates against the conventional wisdom prevalent on the left that the poor need more protection from capitalism — and not, as Mr. Booker suggests, more access to capitalism. While many in his party advocate public works programs and the expansion of social insurance, the mayor prefers to speak about technology’s helping the poor help themselves. “People are now given the tools to control their economic destiny,” he says. His own destiny depends on whether such ideas resonate with New Jersey in the here and now — or sound like mere futurology. *Join an online conversation at http://anand.ly and follow on Twitter.com/anandwrites <http://www.twitter.com/anandwrites> * ** ** ** ** ** More in U.S. (1 of 28 articles)Chicago Says It Will Close 54 Public Schools<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/22/education/chicago-says-it-will-close-54-public-schools.html?src=un&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fjson8.nytimes.com%2Fpages%2Fnational%2Findex.jsonp> Read More »<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/22/education/chicago-says-it-will-close-54-public-schools.html?src=un&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fjson8.nytimes.com%2Fpages%2Fnational%2Findex.jsonp> Rick Ingrasci M.D., M.P.H. Director, Whidbey GeoDome Project Cell: (360) 632-2739 www.whidbeygeodome.org If you want to create a new culture, THROW A BETTER PARTY! _______________________________________________ HOW TO UNSUBSCRIBE Send a message to [email protected] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the subject. LIST HELP For commands you can use with this list, send a message to [email protected] with the word HELP in the subject. -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/