<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: <b class="gmail_sendername">Tom Atlee</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:cii@igc.org">cii@igc.org</a>></span><br>Date: Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 7:38 PM<br>
Subject: A major politician advocating the sharing economy<br>To: Michel Bauwens <<a href="mailto:michel@p2pfoundation.net">michel@p2pfoundation.net</a>>, Janelle Orsi <<a href="mailto:janelle.selc@gmail.com">janelle.selc@gmail.com</a>><br>
<br><br><div style="word-wrap:break-word">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<br>
<div><br><div>Begin forwarded message:</div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div style="margin:0px"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica';font-size:medium;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><b>From: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica';font-size:medium">"Rick Ingrasci M.D." <<a href="mailto:rick@bigmindmedia.com" target="_blank">rick@bigmindmedia.com</a>><br>
</span></div><div style="margin:0px"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica';font-size:medium;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><b>Date: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica';font-size:medium">March 22, 2013 9:08:07 AM PDT<br>
</span></div><div style="margin:0px"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica';font-size:medium;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><b>To: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica';font-size:medium">Invitational <<a href="mailto:invitational@bigmindmedia.com" target="_blank">invitational@bigmindmedia.com</a>>, Hnet <<a href="mailto:hnet@bigmindmedia.com" target="_blank">hnet@bigmindmedia.com</a>>, Natcap <<a href="mailto:natcap@bigmindmedia.com" target="_blank">natcap@bigmindmedia.com</a>><br>
</span></div><div style="margin:0px"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica';font-size:medium;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><b>Subject: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica';font-size:medium"><b>[Invit] A Politician From the Future</b><br>
</span></div><br><div style="word-wrap:break-word"><div><div style="min-height:0px;width:0px"><div></div></div><div style="min-height:0px;width:0px"><div></div></div></div>
<div>
<div>
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/" target="_blank"><img src="" alt="The New York Times" vspace="0" align="left" border="0" hspace="0"></a>
</div>
<div>
</div>
</div>
<br clear="all"><hr align="left" size="1">
<div>March 22, 2013</div>
<div></div>
<h1><u></u>A Politician From the Future<u></u></h1>
<u></u>
<h6>By
<span><a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/anand_giridharadas/index.html" rel="author" title="More Articles by ANAND GIRIDHARADAS" target="_blank">
<span>ANAND GIRIDHARADAS</span></a></span></h6><h6><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/23/us/23iht-letter23.html?smid=tw-share4&_r=0" target="_blank">http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/23/us/23iht-letter23.html?smid=tw-share4&_r=0</a></h6>
<u></u>
<u></u>
<div>
<u></u>
<u></u><p>
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.
</p><p>
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.
</p><p>
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. </p><p>
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. </p><p>
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. </p><p>
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 <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/same_sex_marriage/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier" title="More articles about Same-Sex Marriage, Civil Unions, and Domestic Partnerships." target="_blank">same-sex marriage</a>
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. </p><p>
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. </p><p>
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.� </p><p>
�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.� </p><p>
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. </p><p>
�The issue is not finding the answers,� Mr. Booker says. �It�s just growing them to scale.� </p><p>
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. </p><p>
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. </p><p>
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. </p><p>
�It�s actually helping all of us to enter a world of entrepreneurial
interaction in a way that is so democratic,� he said. </p><p>
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. </p><p>
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. </p><p>
<i>Join an online conversation at <a href="http://anand.ly/" target="_blank">http://anand.ly</a> and follow on <a href="http://www.twitter.com/anandwrites" target="_blank">Twitter.com/anandwrites</a> <i> </i> </i> </p>
<u></u> <div>
</div>
<u></u>
<u></u>
<u></u>
</div>
<u></u>
<br>
<center>
</center>
<div><div><div><div style="width:50px"><img src="" width="13"></div><div style="width:310px"><h6>More in U.S. <span>(1 of 28 articles)</span></h6><h3><a href="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" target="_blank">Chicago Says It Will Close 54 Public Schools</a></h3>
<p><a href="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" target="_blank">Read More �</a></p>
</div><br style="clear:both"></div></div></div><div>
<div style="word-wrap:break-word"><div style="word-wrap:break-word"><span style="border-collapse:separate;font-family:Helvetica;font-size:medium;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;letter-spacing:normal;line-height:normal;text-indent:0px;text-transform:none;white-space:normal;word-spacing:0px"><div style="word-wrap:break-word">
Rick Ingrasci M.D., M.P.H.<br>Director, Whidbey GeoDome Project<br></div><div style="word-wrap:break-word">Cell: <a href="tel:%28360%29%20632-2739" value="+13606322739" target="_blank">(360) 632-2739</a></div><div style="word-wrap:break-word">
<a href="http://www.whidbeygeodome.org/" target="_blank">www.whidbeygeodome.org</a><br><br>If you want to create a new culture,<br>THROW A BETTER PARTY!<br><br></div></span></div></div>
</div>
<br></div>_______________________________________________<br>HOW TO UNSUBSCRIBE<br>Send a message to<br><a href="mailto:Invitational-bigmindmedia.com-request@mail.quantumlinux.com" target="_blank">Invitational-bigmindmedia.com-request@mail.quantumlinux.com</a><br>
with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the subject.<br><br>LIST HELP<br>For commands you can use with this list, send a message to<br><a href="mailto:Invitational-bigmindmedia.com-request@mail.quantumlinux.com" target="_blank">Invitational-bigmindmedia.com-request@mail.quantumlinux.com</a><br>
with the word HELP in the subject.</blockquote></div><br></div></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>P2P Foundation: <a href="http://p2pfoundation.net" target="_blank">http://p2pfoundation.net</a>� - <a href="http://blog.p2pfoundation.net" target="_blank">http://blog.p2pfoundation.net</a> <br>
<br><a href="http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation" target="_blank"></a>Updates: <a href="http://twitter.com/mbauwens" target="_blank">http://twitter.com/mbauwens</a>; <a href="http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens" target="_blank">http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens</a><br>
<br>#82 on the (En)Rich list: <a href="http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/" target="_blank">http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/</a> <br>