A bright new light is penetrating the darkness of Washington DC. This outspoken 29-year-old socialist Puerto Rican was elected to Congress to represent the 14th Congressional District (parts of Queens and the Bronx) after dramatically upsetting Democratic Party insider Joe Crowley in the midterm primaries.
In her race against Crowley, Ocasio-Cortez (a member of the growing Democratic Socialists of America) spent $194,000 to his $3.4 million. The youngest woman ever to serve in Congress, Ocasio-Cortez hit the ground running. She immediately earned the mockery of Fox News when she bluntly announced that she did not have the money to rent an apartment in Washington DC until her congressional salary kicked in, and later earned their ire by proposing a (modest) 70-per-cent marginal tax rate on those earning over $10 million a year. She joined a sit-in of young activists in front of leading house Democrat Nancy Pelosi’s office demanding the adoption of a Green New Deal to address the climate crisis. Her advocacy of a Green New Deal has offended many mainstream Democrats who take money from and are beholden to the fossil-fuel cartel and deem her climate goals ‘too controversial’.
