Do you know Zephyr Teachout?
I'd like to introduce you a bit to Zephyr Teachout. I think she is the sort of candidate that can help reform the democratic party to respond to people over profits.
I encourage you to add her book "Corruption in America" to your reading list. A NYT review is linked below with a short excerpt.
Zephyr Teachout’s ‘Corruption in America’
book review by Thomas Frank
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/19/books/review/zephyr-teachouts-corruption-in-america.html?_r=0
According to Teachout, however, it’s much worse than this. Our current Supreme Court, in Citizens United, “took that which had been named corrupt for over 200 years” — which is to say, gifts to politicians — “and renamed it legitimate.” Teachout does not exaggerate. Here is Justice Kennedy again, in the Citizens United decision: “The censorship we now confront is vast in its reach. The government has ‘muffle[d] the voices that best represent the most significant segments of the economy.’ ”
You read that right: The economy needs to be represented in democratic politics, or at least the economy’s “most significant segments,” whatever those are, and therefore corporate “speech,” meaning gifts, ought not to be censored. Corporations now possess the rights that the founders reserved for citizens, and as Teachout explains, what used to be called “corruption becomes democratic responsiveness.”
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Cuomo wouldn't debate her in the primaries ....
Cuomo Won’t Debate, So Opponent Teachout Debates GOP’s Astorino
http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2014/09/04/cuomo-wont-debate-so-opponent-teachout-debates-gops-astorino/
Teachout, a Columbia University law professor who says Cuomo hasn’t done enough to address income inequality and government corruption, went after the incumbent for refusing to debate before Tuesday’s Democratic primary.
“Andrew Cuomo has an obligation to the public; it’s ultimately disrespectful to voters,” Teachout said. “Democratic primary voters deserve to hear us interact.”
Earlier this week, Cuomo said debates aren’t always good for democracy, a possible reference to the 2010 gubernatorial debates that featured Jimmy McMillan’s Rent is Too Damn High Party.
“I’ve been in many debates that I think were a disservice to democracy,” Cuomo told reporters this week. “Anybody who says debates are always a service to democracy hasn’t watched all the debates that I’ve been in.”
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But she became a contender ... she called out corporate dem corruption
How Zephyr Teachout Became a Contender
http://www.thenation.com/article/181289/how-zephyr-teachout-became-contender#
Cuomo is “a symptom of what’s happening in politics and a very disturbing one, when politics loses its representative nature and it loses its leadership,” Teachout told me. “He’s fundamentally, actually, working for private power.”
The Importance of Zephyr Teachout
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-l-borosage/the-importance-of-zephyr_b_5785104.html
Teachout put corruption at the center of her campaign. Cuomo is the big-money candidate, his politics serving his donors and adding to, rather than challenging, New York's glaring inequality. His education policies burdened teachers with high-stakes testing rather than insuring every child a fair start -- from universal pre-K to smaller classes in the early years to after-school and summer programs. He cut education funding while putting a lid on property taxes and lowering taxes on the rich. He's raised a war chest of $30 million, which doesn't come without cronyism.
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and called out "Reagan-style democrats"
Zephyr Teachout: Andrew Cuomo 'is a not a Democrat'
http://www.msnbc.com/up/watch/teachout--andrew-cuomo-is-a-not-a-democrat--325975619902
Cuomo is “a Reagan, trickle-down Republican”
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She didn't win the primary, as we know. But she had a damn good showing fighting against Cuomo with a lot less money and exposure ...
How Zephyr Teachout Taught Democrats a Lesson in Democracy
http://www.thenation.com/article/181565/how-zephyr-teachout-taught-democrats-lesson-democracy
Teachout didn't beat the incumbent governor with the $35 million war chest, but she took nearly 35 percent of the vote Tuesday night, enough to leave a sizable gash in his left flank and do some permanent damage to his hopes of running for national office one day. She won nearly the entire Hudson Valley, a swath of the middle of the state, and even got 54 percent of the vote in far north St. Lawrence County, according to The New York Times’s election results maps. She took over 10,000 votes in the state’s capital, Albany County, compared to just over 6,000 for the governor. The 62.1 percent of the vote Cuomo garnered is among the poorer performances by an incumbent governor running for re-election in primaries since 2002—a figure that hovers somewhere between the tenth and fifteenth percentile of victory margins, according to FiveThirtyEight. That's pretty bad—the median percentage by which a governor won re-nomination was over 90 percent.
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And I really liked how she spoke out against Cuomo and then didn't let down those who voted for and supported her by endorsing him 
Zephyr Teachout Will Not Endorse Andrew Cuomo
http://observer.com/2014/10/zephyr-teachout-will-not-endorse-andrew-cuomo/
I'll be honest, I don't have huge amounts of faith that we can reform the democratic party, but with someone like Teachout among us ... well ... perhaps??
= new reply since forum marked as read
Very smart lady that I predicted then would someday be a major political force.
