{"id":120065,"date":"2020-11-25T13:52:32","date_gmt":"2020-11-25T10:52:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/economic-justice-doesnt-need-the-blockchain-say-advisors-to-the-squad\/"},"modified":"2020-11-25T13:52:32","modified_gmt":"2020-11-25T10:52:32","slug":"economic-justice-doesnt-need-the-blockchain-say-advisors-to-the-squad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/economic-justice-doesnt-need-the-blockchain-say-advisors-to-the-squad\/","title":{"rendered":"# Economic justice doesn\u2019t need the blockchain, say advisors to \u2018The Squad\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

“# Economic justice doesn\u2019t need the blockchain, say advisors to \u2018The Squad\u2019 <\/strong>”
\n<\/p>\n

American progressives, particularly the high-profile group of Congresswomen known as \u201cthe Squad,\u201d have been highly vocal on questions of economic equity, the corrosive social<\/a> impact of Big Tech and the need to reimagine fiscal and monetary policy in the post-2008 and post-COVID-19 political moment.<\/p>\n

How do they view blockchain technologies and the subsequent debates that have surrounded the digital dollar, given the potential for some overlap when it comes to certain concerns like financial inclusion, efficient distribution and citizens\u2019 privacy?\u00a0<\/p>\n

In a recent interview for Forbes, the economic policy advisors to several members of the Squad \u2014 Alexia Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) \u2014 strongly marked out<\/a> their position as against that of many in the blockchain space.<\/p>\n

Chastity Murphy, Rep. Tlaib\u2019s economic policy advisor, engaged with the digital dollar question as it was raised in the recent \u201cAutomatic Boost to Communities Act,\u201d which proposed digitizing the currency by 2021 as one means to make public stimulus payments more efficient. Murphy said:<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a lot of hype around blockchain technology<\/a>, mostly from people who are thinking about its private sector uses. When it comes to publicly administered digital payments, the more important question is not how to create a distributed ledger managed by multiple actors, but how to create digital cash, which you can hold in your pocket, that doesn’t require a ledger at all. That\u2019s the bigger priority, in our opinion.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Murphy and other advisors to the Squad have underscored the importance of enabling recurring payments to citizens throughout the COVID-19 public health and economic crisis.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For progressives like Murphy, engagement with new technologies in the field of finance and public policy centers less on short-circuiting state and other intermediary actors, and more on the biases baked into many so-called \u201cdisruptive\u201d or innovative solutions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Murphy noted the systemic, damaging impact of automation and algorithmic governance on marginalized communities and people of color. To illustrate this point, she highlighted facial recognition technology and its potential to reinforce racial discrimination<\/a> in areas such as law enforcement and surveillance. This technology is, for her, \u201can example of what happ<\/a>ens when you separate questions of efficiency and design from questions of exclusion, access, and privacy.\u201d \u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n

Another response from Aya Ibrahim, economic policy advisor for Rep. Pressley, revealed a similar difference in priorities when it comes to private actors that aspire to pitch in their own \u201csolutions\u201d to financial exclusion. She told Forbes:<\/p>\n

\u201cFacebook Libra\u2019s selling point initially was that this was going to be a way to bank the unbanked and better serve the underbanked, but that wouldn\u2019t necessarily exist had we provided the services we should had provided.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In their emphasis on the need for coordinated, state-led and publicly accountable measures to tackle financial marginalization, soaring inequality and secular stagnation, the Squad\u2019s priorities \u2014 especially when it comes to fiscal and monetary policy \u2014 place them at some distance from the proponents of decentralized, private-sector digital currencies.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Progressives have been influenced by heterodox economic thinkers such as Stephanie Kelton and other advocates of Modern Monetary Policy, as well as economists that advocate the possibilities of an \u201centrepreneurial state,\u201d such as Mariana Mazzucato.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Such thinkers share a critical stance with many crypto advocates when it comes to policies such as quantitative easing and loose monetary policy; yet their criticism is motivated by the regressive impact that these policies have on economic distribution due to the excessive inflation of asset prices.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Relatedly, progressives\u2019 advocacy of deficit spending and the macroeconomic flexibility that many states as monetary sovereigns enjoy, is a world away from the proponents of \u201chard money\u201d and capped currency supply in the crypto sphere.<\/p>\n

Critics of Big Tech across the political spectrum will, nonetheless, no doubt remember Ocasio-Cortez\u2019s stark characterization of Facebook\u2019s proposals for Libra back in 2019:<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the history of this country, there is a term for being paid in a corporate-controlled currency. [\u2026] It\u2019s called \u2018scrip.\u2019\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cThe idea that your pay could be controlled by a corporation instead of a sovereign government,\u201d Ocasio-Cortez continued, risks destabilizing what should be a public good.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“# Economic justice doesn\u2019t need the blockchain, say advisors to \u2018The Squad\u2019 ” American progressives, particularly the high-profile group of Congresswomen known as \u201cthe Squad,\u201d have been highly vocal on questions of economic equity, the corrosive social impact of Big Tech and the need to reimagine fiscal and monetary policy in the post-2008 and post-COVID-19…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":120066,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/s3.cointelegraph.com\/uploads\/2020-11\/aeb5c5dc-b823-4ec8-81ed-97b0e53f6026.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[75046,75022,75239,76153,77189,32681,70934,67874],"class_list":["post-120065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-cbdc","tag-central-bank","tag-decentralized-finance","tag-dollar","tag-policies","tag-politics","tag-regulation","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120065","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=120065"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120065\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/120066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=120065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=120065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=120065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}