Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is calling for nationalizing large swaths of the U.S. economy in the name of expanding freedom.
Speaking Saturday at a rally for Bernie Sanders — where the freshman congressman offered him her endorsement — AOC said she doesn’t want the private sector to be in charge of her life, so we should have “public owned” systems instead.
“I don’t know about you, but I don’t want Mark Zuckerberg making decisions over my life,” AOC said. “I don’t know about you, but the Waltons have already been making decisions over our lives and what we got was nothing.”
“We need to build a mass movement in America have centered on working-class, poor, middle class,” she said. “One that is actively anti-racist, that is rooted in principles of universality. Everybody has a right to health care. Everybody has a right to an education. One that is rooted in principles of cooperation, that not only racism but misogyny, anti-queer discrimination, we have to have those principles drive us forward because the future is in a public system, a publicly owned system.”
“Because we need to take power over our lives again,” she emphasized as part of her call for greater government management of American society.
“We need a United States that really, truly, authentically is operated, owned, and decided by working in all people in the United States of America,” she said. “It is multi-racial, multi-centered, multi-gendered, multi-generational, and multi-geographic. We have to come together, not ignoring our differences, but listening to them, prioritizing them, understanding injustice, understanding that we evolved in a context that involved slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, and the reality we have today."