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aasthauprety.bsky.social
Aastha पास्ता 🇵🇸
@aasthauprety.bsky.social
300 followers 360 following 150 posts
✍🏽 writer, editor, social policy person 🌹 let your naysayers be your wayfarers on the journey to success 🛸 editorial @rooseveltinstitute.org @rooseveltforward.org and member @nyguild.bsky.social‬

aasthauprety.substack.com 👩🏽‍💻
commie corridor, queens
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aasthauprety.bsky.social
As the Biden administration fades from memory, former officials have sought recognition and plum new positions. Blinken has joined the board of the Center for American Progress think tank; Sullivan and McGurk have positions at Harvard University and, respectively, a podcast with Vox Media and a commentator position at CNN.
November 9, 2025 at 3:24 AM
aasthauprety.bsky.social
mad cuz she’s a sliwa supporter
photo of a brown tabby cat scowling in front of the new york post communist cover of zohran mamdani
November 7, 2025 at 1:54 AM
aasthauprety.bsky.social
this week: cultural criticism caravanseraiforum.substack.com/p/capsule-re...
essential district listening. capsule reviews of films, albums, and books that our writers have enjoyed lately.
November 7, 2025 at 1:53 AM
aasthauprety.bsky.social
🐪🎧 @advaitarun.bsky.social ‘s most provocative work yet
a scene in the style of the lofi beats girl, but with a camel in headphones
November 7, 2025 at 1:53 AM
aasthauprety.bsky.social
arthur wallace’s puppets funded by the new deal’s federal theater project (using govt money to criticize the president—that’s freedom baby)
puppets caricaturing uncle sam and a "two-faced senator" puppet caricaturing FDR as a clown baby
October 28, 2025 at 12:45 AM
aasthauprety.bsky.social
wilmer jennings’s free-flowing revelers at church
painting shows a dynamic image of black worshippers at church around a bible with sunlight streaming in through stained glass windows
October 28, 2025 at 12:45 AM
aasthauprety.bsky.social
hale woodruff’s pantheon of black icons of intellect and politics
painting shows prominent black figures including sojourner truth, frederick douglass, adam clayon powell, benjamin banneker, george washington carver, and others
October 28, 2025 at 12:45 AM
aasthauprety.bsky.social
progressive aesthetics at the detroit institute of art ↘️

diego rivera’s labor-powered murals of the might and menace of industry
diego rivera mural of multiracial factory workers building a car engine diego rivera mural of a boss standing menacingly in a crowd of factory laborers building a car
October 28, 2025 at 12:38 AM
aasthauprety.bsky.social
"This suffering is widespread across the entire Gaza Strip and spares no age or social group." euromedmonitor.org/uploads/two-... euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6...
October 23, 2025 at 4:33 PM
aasthauprety.bsky.social
follow for the hottest policy discourse trends 👀 open.substack.com/pub/caravans...
Caravanserai Substack post subtitled “What are the promises (and pitfalls) of ‘affordability’ as a political goal?”
October 22, 2025 at 7:06 PM
aasthauprety.bsky.social
AFFORDABILITY is winning the battle of political ideas. But what should we watch out for? Three writers weigh in.
POV of political pamphlets titled "affordability" in front of the front door of a house. Overlayed on this image is the post title, "But the worth of a human can also persuade."
October 15, 2025 at 6:30 PM
aasthauprety.bsky.social
out today in our new home for policy conversations ✍🏽 caravanseraiforum.substack.com/p/all-of-the...
with @advaitarun.bsky.social + daevan
You can choose to look up—at all that is above. Is "all-of-the-above" energy policy a smokescreen for fossil fuel lock-in? If not, why not?
October 8, 2025 at 2:21 PM
aasthauprety.bsky.social
one writer’s take on “all-of-the-above” energy policy
You look to the sky and see a hummingbird’s metabolism powering a wind that holds it in divine stillness. It drinks nectar from a flower shaded by a sequoia that has towered since before the Iron Age. The tree clones itself into a forest through the simple combination of sunlight and water, along a mountain range forged by centuries of tectonic heat below your feet. You see the vast amounts of force from the sun, water, wind, and heat from the core of the planet. You want to build society with the sources of energy that have powered life for eons, they want to kick rocks around in the graves they rob.
October 8, 2025 at 2:21 PM
aasthauprety.bsky.social
It’s good to reflect on the political moment, to react to its eccentricities with thoughtful analysis—but, this time, how about we do it with some flair?
October 4, 2025 at 1:15 PM
aasthauprety.bsky.social
Cannot express enough how excited I am for this. You should register!! us02web.zoom.us/meeting/regi...
Beyond "America First": Toward a Global Working-Class Economics. A Fireside Chat on Wednesday, October 8 at 12:00 pm ET
October 1, 2025 at 7:03 PM
aasthauprety.bsky.social
"If you promise hope and change and fail to deliver, there is no way to recover from the consequent sense of popular betrayal, and no way to credibly promise change again."

"What happened to the future? When did we lose it, and what has taken its place?" www.nybooks.com/articles/202...
Barack Obama offered a vision of hope and change in 2008, a moment he hoped future generations would look back on as the time when “we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” Instead his administration presided over continually widening inequality, the destruction of about 30 percent of Black home equity, a fossil fuel boom, a steady increase in health care costs, sweeping domestic surveillance, extrajudicial drone murders, and seeming impunity for the architects of the Iraq War and the 2008 crisis. If you promise hope and change and fail to deliver, there is no way to recover from the consequent sense of popular betrayal, and no way to credibly promise change again. Since 2016 the Democratic Party has consisted of two things: the Sanders left and efforts to defeat it. Abundance is the latest effort, a closed parenthesis in the halfhearted sentence of contemporary liberalism.
September 6, 2025 at 2:06 PM
aasthauprety.bsky.social
The most successful parts of Bidenomics came from the progressive policymakers, advocates and economists. Big Fiscal showed we know how to reverse a recession and get people back to work. The expanded child tax credit proved we can cut child poverty in half when we choose to. Enhanced unemployment benefits demonstrated that direct support does not create dependency or keep people out of jobs — it creates security and growth. By contrast, aspects of the Sullivan approach to industrial and innovation policy proved less effective. Their focus on private-sector partnerships and competition with China meant that benefits flowed mainly to private companies rather than building lasting public capacity, and the inevitable splitting of policies across multiple bills to serve different constituencies created coordination problems that persist in everything from electrical interconnection queues to stalled efforts at supply chain resilience by moving key nodes to allied nations, or "friendshoring".
August 20, 2025 at 4:56 PM
aasthauprety.bsky.social
💯💯💯
Finally, Democrats should not forget that climate remains a cost of living issue. In a city like New Orleans, rocked by the recent nuclear outage, residents spend, on average, over 19% of their incomes on their energy bills, over three times the DOE's threshold to be considered an energy-burdened community. Their bills already include adders for climate adaptation and disaster preparedness - yet, for all they spend, they still face blackouts, and their costs will only increase as their grid continues to deteriorate. Here, climate policy is not about combating Chinese supply chain dominance, or even about delivering an American industrial renaissance. It's about keeping the lights on, keeping bills low, keeping the air clean, and keeping residents safe from disaster.
August 17, 2025 at 9:09 PM
aasthauprety.bsky.social
Help pass two 🇵🇸 resolutions at the CWA convention in 2 weeks:
1. Pledge your support on the form at cwa4p.org
2. Call or email your local’s delegates + urge them to support the resolutions
3. Share with others in your shop, local, and throughout CWA ✊🏽
Every CWA member can help pass two urgent resolutions in solidarity with Palestinian unions at our convention on August 11 and 12. Resolution 1: Resolution for an Immediate Arms Embargo in Solidarity With Palestinian Trade Unions Resolution 2: Resolution to Uphold the Palestinian Trade Union Picket Line What YOU can do: 1. Email or call your delegates and tell them to VOTE YES and actively support both resolutions at convention 2. Support the resolution as a delegate and speak out on the floor at convention in favor 3. Share this post, promote our account and the website, and otherwise spread this info far and wide we need to ensure as many CWA members as possible join our effort Visit CWA4P.org to find: • The full text of both resolutions • A toolkit with sample email language, talking points, and more strategy tips for talking to your delegates, coworkers, and union comrades about the resolutions • FAQ on this work and convention logistics • A pledge form to help us map our outreach!
July 29, 2025 at 3:50 AM
aasthauprety.bsky.social
“the truly savvy politician stakes out positions that align with public opinion before voters get there”
And what about the messages that never get tested because no one has the gumption and ambition to propose them? To run on protecting Social Security and Medicare, after all, Democrats initially had to invent Social Security and Medicare-and they had to do it without having yet paid someone to run the numbers on whether voters would approve of protecting these programs. But if you play dead for an entire presidential term while everyone in the U.S. who isn't considered sufficiently white gets thrown into the back of a van, can you simply flip a switch to transform the country back into the world's model of liberal democracy and cosmopolitan prosperity?
July 15, 2025 at 10:42 PM
aasthauprety.bsky.social
big week … dems tapped jake sullivan to strategize for 2029 and CAP has appointed antony blinken to their board
Biden National Security Adviser Among Those Crafting 'Project 2029' Policy Agenda for Democrats "Jake Sullivan's been a critical decision-maker in every Democratic catastrophe of the last decade," said one observer. "Why is he still in the inner circle?" CAP board of directors lists Antony J. Blinken first
July 3, 2025 at 1:23 AM
aasthauprety.bsky.social
powerhouse panel!
June 24, 2025 at 7:38 PM
aasthauprety.bsky.social
zohran mamdani
a brown and white tabby cat lying on a checkered carpet next to zohran mamdani paraphernalia
June 17, 2025 at 3:25 AM
aasthauprety.bsky.social
Haaretz headline reads “Gaza's Last Hospital for 10,000 Cancer Patients Shuts Down Due to Repeated Israeli Strikes”
May 19, 2025 at 4:24 AM
aasthauprety.bsky.social
Mahmoud Khalil from detention in the @washingtonpost.com www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...
I write this letter as the sun rises, hoping that the suspension of my rights will raise alarm bells that yours are already in jeopardy. I hope it will inspire your outrage that the most basic human instinct, to protest shameless massacre, is being repressed by obscure laws, racist propaganda and a state terrified of an awakened public. I hope this writing will startle you into understanding that a democracy for some — a democracy of convenience — is no democracy at all. I hope it will shake you into acting before it is too late.
April 18, 2025 at 12:30 AM