To save the planet, first we’ll need to embrace Karl Marx.
That’s the strategy coming from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is the lead sponsor of the so-called Green New Deal.
Aiming to clear up “an awful lot of misinformation” about her plan, AOC on Wednesday read the entirety of her resolution into the congressional record.
But it’s hard to see where the actual plan differed from the “rumors” she sought to dispel, as the vast majority of her proposals bore no relation to the environment.
Per AOC, the Green New Deal is not just a plan to curb CO2 emissions, but rather a larger remaking of American society itself. To wit, the plan includes:
— Housing for every American
— Mandated paid vacations and medical leave
— High paying union jobs for every American
— Universal health care
— Renovating every building in America
— “Universal access to healthy food”
— An end to discrimination against all marginalized groups, which she calls “frontline communities.”
The plan, Grabien News exclusively reported to the public back in January 2019, quickly courted controversy for aspiring to do everything fron changing Americans’ eating habits, to methods of travel, to paying black Americans reparations for slavery. After Grabien’s report attracted nationwide attention, AOC backed away from the document, claiming this was just a “draft” that a staffer having a “bad day” accidentally published.
But the updated document is virtually identical to the widely mocked original, save for slavery reparations and an explicit effort to phase out air travel.
The resolution begins with a condemnation of the United States, blaming the U.S. for its “disproportionate amount of greenhouse gas emissions.” The broadside against American continues, citing “declining life expectancy,” “wage stagnation,” insufficient “socioeconomic mobility,” “the greatest income inequality since the 1920s,” a “racial wealth divide” and a “gender earnings gap.”
The resolution thus attempts at solving these issues through a variety of Washington-led redistribution programs. Amongst the resolutions many non-environmental components:
— “Providing resources, training and high-quality education, including higher education to all people of the United States.”
— “Ensure prosperity and economic security for all people in the United States.”
— “Building a more sustainable food system that ensures universal access to healthy food”
— “Ensuring a commercial environment where every business person is free from unfair competition and domination by domestic or international monopolies.”
— “Strengthening and protecting the right of all workers to organize, unionize and collectively bargain free of coercion, intimidation and harassment.”
— “Promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future and repairing historic oppression of indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, the industrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities.”
— “Providing all people of the United States with high-quality health care, affordable, safe and adequate housing, economic security and clean water, clean air, healthy and affordable food, and access to nature.”
Add it up, and the Green New Deal covers housing, health care, transportation, social justice, income inequality, education, and energy — virtually every aspect of American life.
According to AOC, “we have maybe 10 years left” to prevent a global climate cataclysm, which makes it strange that she’s investing so much of her ostensibly planet-saving proposal on unrelated social justice objectives. It almost makes one wonder: Maybe this isn’t about the environment at all?