thebigp

Tristan Justice / November 06, 2018 /
On Nov. 1, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attended a get out the v**e rally in New York City. (Photo: Jeenah Moon/Reuters/Newscom)
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez The 29-year-old self-described socialist, here’s a look back at some of the congresswoman-elect’s hot-button statements made in media appearances along the campaign trail.
1. Capitalism in the Crosshairs
“Unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs,” Ocasio-Cortez continued to argue the days of capitalism are numbered: And so I do think that right now we have this no-holds-barred, Wild West hyper-capitalism. What that means is profit at any cost. Capitalism has not always existed in the world, and it will not always exist in the world. When this country started, we were not a capitalist [nation], we did not operate on a capitalist economy.
2. Backpedaling on Israel
referred to the situation in Palestine as an “occupation” by Israelwho graduated with a bachelor’s degree in economics and international relations from Boston University, struggled to explain her comment. “I am not the expert on geopolitics on this issue,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “You know, for me, I’m a firm believer in finding a two-state solution on this issue.”
3. Explaining the Extinction of the Middle Class
In another interview, speaking with former Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett on the liberal podcast “Pod Save America,” Ocasio-Cortez claimed the “upper-middle class doesn’t exist anymore.” Ocasio-Cortez was discussing the political ideology of the country’s different socioeconomic classes when she made the claim: I think that politically, this upper-middle class is probably more moderate, but that upper-middle class doesn’t exist anymore in America, and thanks to the continued deregulation of Wall Street, thanks to the continued gutting of working- and middle-class people, we need stronger champions.
4. A Simple Payment Plan for Progressive Medicare
When asked in an interview with Jorge Ramos last week about how to pay for Sen. Bernie Sanders’, I-V.T., “Medicare for All” proposal, which Ocasio-Cortez has put at the center of her campaign, Ocasio-Cortez responded, “You just pay for it.” She continued: People often say, how are you gonna pay for it? And I find the question so puzzling because, how do you pay for something that’s more affordable? How do you pay for cheaper rent? How do you pay for—you just pay for it. claimed Sanders’ “Medicare for All” plan would save the country $2 trillion if implemented, but the claim has been criticized by fact-checkers as inaccurate. In fact, a study by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University shows the plan would cost more than $32.6 trillion over 10 years, requiring historic tax hikes.
5. Comparing C*****e C****e to World War II
, the last time we had a really major existential threat to this country was around World War II, and so we’ve been here before and we have a blueprint of doing this before,” Ocasio-Cortez said, adding: What we had was an existential threat in the context of a war. We had a direct existential threat with another nation, this time it was N**i Germany, and the Axis, who explicitly made the United States as an enemy, as an enemy. And what we did was that we chose to mobilize our entire economy and industrialized our entire economy and we put hundreds if not millions of people to work in defending our shores and defending this country. We have to do the same thing in order to get us to 100 percent renewable energy, and that’s just the t***h of it.
6. Shutting Down Debate on F****l F**ls
According to Fox News, Ocasio-Cortez declared at a campaign fundraiser there was “no debate” that f****l f**l production should be stopped. “There’s no debate as to whether we should continue producing f****l f**ls. There’s no debate,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
7. Carrying the ‘Organizer’ Torch to Washington
When asked by Chris Hayes on MSNBC about what she plans to do once she gets to Congress in two months, Ocasio-Cortez struggled to develop a coherent response and failed to offer any specifics. Instead, Ocasio-Cortez delivered this message on air: Well, I think a lot of it has to do with changing our strategy around governance. You know there’s a lot of inside baseball and inside the beltway as you, you always hear that term thrown around. But there are very few organizers in Congress. And I do think that organizers operate differently. It’s a different kind of strategy. And what it is, is really about organizing and, and really thinking about that word: organizing. Segmenting people. Being strategic in their actions in really bringing together a cohesive strategy of putting pressure on the chamber instead of only focusing on the pressures inside the chamber.
To which Hayes responded, “That’s a really interesting thought.”
HALF TRUE
"70 percent of Americans believe in improved and expanded Medicare for All."
FALSE
"70 percent of Americans believe in improved and expanded Medicare for All."
FALSE
In her defeat of Republican Rep. Karen Handel, Democratic challenger Lucy McBath "was outspent 5-1."
FALSE
Total budget straight from military's wish list
"Just last year we gave the military a $700 billion budget increase, which they didn’t even ask for."
MOSTLY TRUE
This ratio won't leave you out in the cold
Says U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said "owning guns IS NOT a right, if it were a right it would be in the Constitution."
PANTS ON FIRE
Facebook posts
U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has secured a seat on the House Financial Services Committee but her "credit score is 430 and has had two checking accounts closed, along with two sheriff's evictions."
PANTS ON FIRE
She never said those words
Quotes incoming U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as saying "under capitalism, man oppresses man. Under socialism, it’s the other way around."
All statements from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
FALSE
"$21T in Pentagon accounting errors. Medicare for All costs ~$32T. That means 66% of Medicare for All could have been funded already by the Pentagon."
FALSE
In her defeat of Republican Rep. Karen Handel, Democratic challenger Lucy McBath "was outspent 5-1."
FALSE
"Just last year we gave the military a $700 billion budget increase, which they didn’t even ask for."
MOSTLY TRUE
In New York City, "for every one person experiencing homelessness here, there are about three vacant apartments."
PANTS ON FIRE
"Unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs. Unemployment is low because people are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week and can barely feed their family."
FALSE
"ICE is required to fill 34,000 beds with detainees every single night and that number has only been increasing since 2009."
V***l image
Says U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said "owning guns IS NOT a right, if it were a right it would be in the Constitution."
— PolitiFact Facebook fact-checks on Thursday, January 24th, 2019
PANTS ON FIRE
U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has secured a seat on the House Financial Services Committee but her "credit score is 430 and has had two checking accounts closed, along with two sheriff's evictions."
PANTS ON FIRE
Quotes incoming U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as saying "under capitalism, man oppresses man. Under socialism, it’s the other way around."
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
✔ @AOC


The GOP is:
- weak on fighting for working class Americans
- weak on crime
- weak on equal rights
- weak on national security
- weak on rejecting r****m
- weak on moral courage
- weak on family values

July 27, 2018
Five I***tic Moments in the Most Recent Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Interview—wash free beacon
August 9, 2018 2:28 pm
I can never thank enough the Democratic v**ers of New York's 14th congressional district for giving us Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the young Latina who stunned politicos by beating powerful Democrat Joe Crowley in the primary. Ocasio-Cortez's win was greeted with enthusiasm by the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party, who hailed her as a rising star and a champion for democratic socialism.
But since then Ocasio-Cortez has been a gaffe-generating gift to her opponents. First she completely whiffed on a question about Israel in an interview with PBS, even straight up admitting "I am not the expert on geopolitics on this issue." She earned a "Pants on Fire" rating from Politifact for the same interview, when she claimed that unemployment was down because people were working multiple jobs. In her next interview she completely flip-flopped on her response on the Israel question to please the left. She responded to the critics of the first interview by accusing them of being members of the alt-right (they weren't) and angrily accused her former primary opponent Crowley of secretly trying to mount a third-party run (he wasn't).
This was in a span of three days.
The Washington Post Fact-Checker gave this claim Three Pinocchios recently. The Mercatus study only "found" that Medicare-for-All would be cheaper than the current system because the author Charles Blahous was exceedingly generous to claims from Bernie Sanders and others that it would lead to huge savings in administrative costs. The point of the study was to prove that even if those savings emerged, the pricetag for Medicare-for-all would be enormous and still require substantial tax increases.
In other words, the study "found" that Medicare-for-all would save money compared to the current system in the long-run because the author charitably took it for granted that it would. "It is likely that the actual cost of [Medicare-for-all] would be substantially greater than these estimates, which assume significant administrative and drug cost savings under the plan, and also assume that healthcare providers operating under[Medicare-for-all] will be reimbursed at rates more than 40 percent lower than those currently paid by private health insurance," Blahous wrote.
Ocasio-Cortez continued:
And let’s not forget that the reason that the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act is because they ruled that each of these monthly payments that everyday Americans make is a tax. And so while it may not seem like we pay that tax on April 15th, we pay it every single month, or we do pay it tax season if we don't buy, you know, these plans off of the exchange.
This is just wrong. The Supreme Court ruled that the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act was constitutional because the penalty for those who didn't get healthcare was effectively a tax. Whether normal monthly premiums were a "tax" in a philosophical sense did not factor into their analysis in the slightest.
Then she uttered this doozy:
Americans have the sticker shock of healthcare as it is, and what we’re also not talking about is why aren’t we incorporating the cost of all the funeral expenses of those who died because they can’t afford access to healthcare? That is part of the cost of our system.
I can't believe I have to spell this out, but funeral costs are usually discounted when discussing healthcare costs because they're baked in no matter what. Pete could receive excellent healthcare and live to 100 or poor healthcare and die at 20, but either way at some point someone's paying for Pete's coffin, a plot of land, and some bagpipes.
There are no long-term savings to be found in funeral costs no matter what the healthcare system. Even if Medicare-for-all miraculously raised life expectancy in the U.S. by a year, that would only defer funeral costs on average by a year. Unless commentators were being literal when they called Ocasio-Cortez the Democratic messiah, the funeral costs of every living American cannot be eliminated or diminished, merely briefly postponed.
We write unlimited blank checks for war. We just wrote a $2 trillion check for that tax cut, the GOP tax cut. And nobody asked those folks how are they going to pay for it.
This isn't wrong so much as it completely obfuscates the scale of difference between the price-tag on Ocasio-Cortez's proposal and the GOP tax bill and military spending. The higher estimates find GOP tax bill is expected to cost $2.3 trillion over ten years. Ocasio's plan is estimated to cost more than that annually, or $32.6 trillion over the same timespan. Likewise, the Congressional Research Service found in 2014 that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had cost $1.6 trillion over 13 years. We could wage thirty times as many wars and only start to get close to the sort of cash required for Medicare-for-all.
No doubt Ocasio-Cortez would respond to these points by accusing me of trying to cover up some GOP sin. After another factually-challenged interview with the sympathetic Pod Save America podcast (in which she also failed to answer how she would pay for Medicare-for-all) and after most of her endorsed candidates lost their primary races, Ocasio-Cortez accused conservatives of trying to distract from the recent indictment of Republican Congressman Chris Collins.

source-PoliticsNews—the daily signal—politifact- the daily wire---Ryan Saavedra Alex Griswold-