[P2P-F] Fwd: A major politician advocating the sharing economy

Sat Mar 23 14:55:32 CET 2013

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Tom Atlee <cii at igc.org>
Date: Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 7:38 PM
Subject: A major politician advocating the sharing economy
To: Michel Bauwens <michel at p2pfoundation.net>, Janelle Orsi <
janelle.selc at gmail.com>

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." <rick at bigmindmedia.com>
*Date: *March 22, 2013 9:08:07 AM PDT
*To: *Invitational <invitational at bigmindmedia.com>, Hnet <
hnet at bigmindmedia.com>, Natcap <natcap at bigmindmedia.com>
*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!

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