After New York City’s race for mayor catapulted Zohran Mamdani from state assembly member into one of the world’s most prominent progressive voices, intense debate swirled over the ideas at the heart of his campaign.
His critics and opponents painted pledges such as free bus service, universal child care and rent freezes as unworkable, unrealistic and exorbitantly expensive.
But some have hit back, highlighting the quirk of geography that underpins some of this view. “He promised things that Europeans take for granted, but Americans are told are impossible,” said Dutch environmentalist and former government advisor Alexander Verbeek in the wake of Tuesday’s election.
Verbeek backed this with a comment he had overheard in an Oslo café, in which Mamdani was described as an American politician who “finally” sounded normal.
I always found it absurd that in the richest country in the world, there is no universal health insurance, no parental leave, no public holidays, that a college education costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, that there is no protection against dismissal, that people are starving or working but still homeless because they cannot afford an apartment—all of this is inhumane, uncivilized, and a disgrace to the US, not its recipe for success; it is its downfall, as the current regime is demonstrating.
Cite your sources please, unless you mean to suggest that simply a rich person entering my house that I’m rich suddenly
It’s the richest country in the history of humanity and all we did with it was oppress other nations, build a massive military, and sell the nation off to the rich. So far it’s not a winning plan for anyone outside of the top 1%. Same shit, bigger piles of gold.
Well, you have produced the richest man in history, who is a Nazi and, apart from his wealth, does not seem to be particularly intelligent—but all the more greedy for it.
Alone we go fast, together we go far. We’re rich relative to other countries specifically because of how much we valued greed after ww2. Now that wave has ended and if we want to keep going we need to figure out how the second half of that statement works.
The wealthy in the US got rich by exploiting the rest of the population.