Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

[Derec]

She Instagrammed

Of course she did. Because a platform dominated by InstaTHOTs and various influencers is perfect venue for making serious political points.

First off, let's make something clear:
Brazil is a Black and Mixed country. 56% of Brazilians identify as Black or mixed race

So?

However, despite that large number, Black Brazilians still face very high levels of economic marginalization, structural racism, and police violence.

It is a fallacy of "equity" that everything must be distributed evenly with demographic proportions.
If blacks commit more crimes (like they do in US) then it would be expected that they are on the receiving end of more police violence than their share of the population. Just because outcomes are different does not mean there is "structural racism" no matter how much the woke left want to equate unequal outcomes with "racism".

Police violence is an especially extreme crisis, with killings happening at alarmingly high rates with no recourse or accountability.

How about some numbers. How many shootings per capita? How many of the shootings were justified? How many shootees were armed?
All those things matter. That she is only resorting to adjectives like "extreme" and adverbs like "alarmingly" tells me she does not have good data.

Anielle shared with me that 40 Black men and boys have been killed by police in the last two weeks alone. And those are just the numbers they have counted - many others go uncounted.

Well, that's something. 40 in two weeks. That's about 1000 per year if representative. Brazil has a population of 214M. So it would seem a higher rate in the US. But overall crime rate, including homicides is much higher (22.4 for Brazil, 6.8 for US, i.e. more than 3x higher) so it is not surprising that police would also shoot more criminals.
What were the circumstances behind these shootings? Were perps armed? Were they attacking police or somebody else?

On this subject, a few years ago, right-wingers got very worked up when she said that "Latinos are black", but she then went on to say that Latinos are a very mixed population, and that Latinos have to face up to their own racial problems.

So she admits that saying "Latinos are black" was wrong?

 

[lpetrich]

AOC likes the activism culture there.

- I've said it a lot, but Brazil's movements are both radical and practical at the same time. It's inspiring to see that dynamic imbue everything. So often in the US we are told these things cannot coexist (radicals claim that practicality and compromise is "selling out" or betraying values, pragmatists say radicalism is nice in theory but impossible/impractical). MTST/MST show you can do both. They are so clear-eyed and focused

- You can build autonomous, self-sustaining movements on direct action that ALSO fuels a strong electoral force

AOC herself has been jumped up and down on by not supporting some things that some online left-wingers like, like "Force the Vote". That was to only vote for some candidate for House Speaker in 2021 that supported having a vote on Medicare for All. AOC didn't like the idea, because there weren't enough votes for M4A. That seems defeatist, but that would be without an effort to push a M4A bill.

Also, activist movements with some direct-action success thus have successes to point to, thus making them available to support sympathetic political candidates.

She didn't say anything about the Presidency vs. downballot offices: the national legislature, regional offices, local offices, but given who she met in Brazil, it would at least be the national legislature. That is what has made the US Green Party politically irrelevant -- focusing on the Presidency to the exclusion of everything else.

 

[lpetrich]

She accepted questions like "What do you think community organizers in the us could learn from counterparts in Brazil?"

- Experiment with new and creative direct actions

- Theory is important, as is education, but don't waste so much time debating it. Just go, study, reflect, and improve along the way.

- Do not weaken movements by being overly critical of differences among allies. Discussion is good, but the right wing THRIVES off of left publicly tearing each other down. There's a rejection of that here. It's cultural, too. You can have differences and build in a real way that doesn't require papering over your principles

- In general, spend less time criticizing and analyzing and more time doing and trying things

- The movement-to-party/ movement-to-elected relationship is COMPLETELY different here. Instead of focusing on votes, they focus on political projects

Left-wingers have squabbled among themselves for at least a century, sometimes making each other their biggest enemies, something that the movie Life of Brian memorably satirized.

After mentioning Jair Bolsonaro being like Donald Trump, and the challenges of working with the national legislature,

But one major difference I sense here is that people's movements here are less hung up on that. They look for every systemic opportunity they can get, see the political limits without cynicism, and ALSO work outside electoralism to base-build all while holding the electoral work as essential, too.

She didn't get to meet President Lula, however, though Lula visited her when he visited DC.

As she was leaving for her next stop, this happened: Readout of President Joe Biden’s Call with President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil | The White House

The two leaders spoke at length about cooperation on climate and preparations for COP28, including President Biden’s commitment to request $500 million from Congress over five years to support the Amazon Fund and related activities, as well as ongoing efforts to help mobilize up to $1 billion to support the restoration of degraded lands in Brazil and the Amazon region through the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation. The President applauded Brazil’s regional and global leadership on climate ...

President Biden and President Lula also committed to work together to advance and protect workers’ rights, and to promote inclusive prosperity for our two countries and the world.

 

[lpetrich]

AOC is Instagramming about her trip to Brazil. She met a lot of officials and activists there, and she often spoke Spanish there, even though the national language is Portuguese. She could be understood because Brazil has to do business with the rest of Latin America, and as a result, many Brazilians learn Spanish. Portuguese is basically just a dialect of Spanish, and so the two languages are mutually comprehensible, though speakers of neither like to admit it

FTFY.

Portuguese is a different language from Spanish in the same way that Glasgow English is a different language from London English, or New York English is a different language from Alabama English; Speakers of one might occasionally find speakers of the other rather obscure, and frequently comical, but if they put in a minor effort, they can usually work out what is being said.

Spanish Vs. Portuguese: A Detailed Comparison Of The Two Romance Languages -- "Spoken Spanish and Portuguese are less mutually intelligible than their written forms." and "However, it is said that Portuguese speakers typically understand spoken Spanish better than Spanish speakers understand spoken Portuguese." then noting differences like

pelado translates to “skinned” or “peeled” in both languages but colloquially changes its meaning to “having a shaved head or new haircut” in Spanish and “being naked” in Portuguese. You wouldn’t want to mix those two, wouldn’t you?

The lopsided mutual intelligibility of Spanish and Portuguese | Spanish Linguist

he Portuguese speakers were more successful than the Spanish speakers at interpreting what they heard, a difference that was slim yet statistically significant.

To find out why, I checked in with my great friend (and Portuguese expert) Bonnie Wasserman. She suggested that the main factor was the greater complexity of the Portuguese vowel system. Compared to Spanish’s economical five-vowel system, Portuguese has more core vowels and also a set of nasalized vowels.

...
A second factor is rhythmic. While Spanish is more stacatto, with each word pronounced individually, Portuguese words are more connected. This makes it harder for Spanish speakers to pick out familiar words when heard in context.

Are Spanish and Portuguese mutually intelligible? : languagelearning at Reddit

Our shared history also mean that we have a lot of false cognates, which makes things harder.

But we can communicate with each other using what we have in common in less sensitive situations, like tourism.

Are Spanish, Italian and Portuguese mutually intelligible? - Quora

 

[lpetrich]

P

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "US sunscreens are far behind the rest of the world and our regulations aren’t necessarily making our sunscreens better or safer — but it doesn’t have to be this way! (vid link)" / X - what she said on Instagram

Some online left-wingers jumped up and down on AOC (metaphorically, of course!) about this issue.

I just read this Granuaid article about that:
Sunscreen socialism: AOC divides the left with call for better skincare options

So what? It's only right-wingers who like caricatures like being in favor of every regulation there is.

About reclaiming abandoned land, AOC mentioned this in the US: Mothers who occupied vacant Oakland house will be allowed to buy it | California | The Guardian - "Intervention of California governor helps Moms 4 Housing group score victory in fight against state’s homeless crisis"

There is only one thing standing between these squatters and a $500k house.

Good thing for the squatters that Gov. Goodhair is on their side and there to force the sale to them. At a price much less than market price, surely.

Abandoned-property law has been around since the Twelve Tables of Rome, at least, and here was a house that was abandoned in all but name.

 

[lpetrich]

Police violence is an especially extreme crisis, with killings happening at alarmingly high rates with no recourse or accountability.

...
Anielle shared with me that 40 Black men and boys have been killed by police in the last two weeks alone. And those are just the numbers they have counted - many others go uncounted.

Well, that's something. 40 in two weeks. ...

Why not use such "reasoning" on false accusations of rape?

On this subject, a few years ago, right-wingers got very worked up when she said that "Latinos are black", but she then went on to say that Latinos are a very mixed population, and that Latinos have to face up to their own racial problems.

So she admits that saying "Latinos are black" was wrong?

She might have wanted to say something like "Latinos are black, Latinos are Native, Latinos are European", thus acknowledging their mixed heritage, as she went on to do with some other wording.

 

[Shadowy Man]

It is a fallacy of "equity" that everything must be distributed evenly with demographic proportions.
If blacks commit more crimes (like they do in US) then it would be expected that they are on the receiving end of more police violence than their share of the population. Just because outcomes are different does not mean there is "structural racism" no matter how much the woke left want to equate unequal outcomes with "racism".

And what if structural racism is the reason that “blacks [sic] commit more crimes” ?

 

[Elixir]

And what if structural racism is the reason that “blacks [sic] commit more crimes” ?

YOU'RE BLAMING INNOCENT WHITE PEOPLE FOR THE TERRIBLE THINGS BLACK PEOPLE DO!
THEY NEED TO GO BACK TO AFRICA! WE NEVER SHOULD HAVE LET THEM COME HERE AND GET FREE TRAINING!

 

[bilby]

AOC is Instagramming about her trip to Brazil. She met a lot of officials and activists there, and she often spoke Spanish there, even though the national language is Portuguese. She could be understood because Brazil has to do business with the rest of Latin America, and as a result, many Brazilians learn Spanish. Portuguese is basically just a dialect of Spanish, and so the two languages are mutually comprehensible, though speakers of neither like to admit it

FTFY.

Portuguese is a different language from Spanish in the same way that Glasgow English is a different language from London English, or New York English is a different language from Alabama English; Speakers of one might occasionally find speakers of the other rather obscure, and frequently comical, but if they put in a minor effort, they can usually work out what is being said.

Spanish Vs. Portuguese: A Detailed Comparison Of The Two Romance Languages -- "Spoken Spanish and Portuguese are less mutually intelligible than their written forms." and "However, it is said that Portuguese speakers typically understand spoken Spanish better than Spanish speakers understand spoken Portuguese." then noting differences like

pelado translates to “skinned” or “peeled” in both languages but colloquially changes its meaning to “having a shaved head or new haircut” in Spanish and “being naked” in Portuguese. You wouldn’t want to mix those two, wouldn’t you?

The lopsided mutual intelligibility of Spanish and Portuguese | Spanish Linguist

he Portuguese speakers were more successful than the Spanish speakers at interpreting what they heard, a difference that was slim yet statistically significant.

To find out why, I checked in with my great friend (and Portuguese expert) Bonnie Wasserman. She suggested that the main factor was the greater complexity of the Portuguese vowel system. Compared to Spanish’s economical five-vowel system, Portuguese has more core vowels and also a set of nasalized vowels.

...
A second factor is rhythmic. While Spanish is more stacatto, with each word pronounced individually, Portuguese words are more connected. This makes it harder for Spanish speakers to pick out familiar words when heard in context.

Are Spanish and Portuguese mutually intelligible? : languagelearning at Reddit

Our shared history also mean that we have a lot of false cognates, which makes things harder.

But we can communicate with each other using what we have in common in less sensitive situations, like tourism.

Are Spanish, Italian and Portuguese mutually intelligible? - Quora

Now do the same comparison for Glasgow English and Home Counties (BBC) English.

You might be surprised at how similar the differences are.

Indeed, if you presented your post to a British audience, with all references to Portuguese substituted with Glasgow, and all references to Spanish substituted with Home Counties, few would have any disagreement with it.

 

[lpetrich]

Jared Polis on X: "Thank you AOC for standing up for free-market capitalism and small businesses against a bureaucratic statist attack and government seizure of assets" / X
noting
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on X: "Last week ..." / X

Last week, the @NYCSanitation did a night raid of the street vendors in Corona Plaza — a special place in our district that’s a hub of culture & cuisine.

This enforcement served no one. It confiscated vendors’ property, shut down & spread fear in this immigrant community.

Currently, the waitlist for vendor licenses is so long it’s been closed for over a decade.

We need to increase licenses, rather than punish people just trying to provide for themselves & their families.

Small business owners shouldn’t be penalized for government failures.

This and sunscreen have resulted in some right-libertarians gloating that she is on their side.

 

[Shadowy Man]

And what if structural racism is the reason that “blacks [sic] commit more crimes” ?

YOU'RE BLAMING INNOCENT WHITE PEOPLE FOR THE TERRIBLE THINGS BLACK PEOPLE DO!
THEY NEED TO GO BACK TO AFRICA! WE NEVER SHOULD HAVE LET THEM COME HERE AND GET FREE TRAINING!

You're assuming that structural racism can be blamed on people. Not that it arises naturally like other disasters, like earthquakes, wildfires, mass shootings or global warming.

 

[lpetrich]

AOC is now in Chile, and she met with officials there, like Camila Vallejo Dowling (@camilantoniamaranta) • Instagram photos and videos
Camila Vallejo Dowling
Ministra de la Secretaría General de Gobierno @voceriadegobierno
Comunista y Feminista
Pdta Fech 2011
Geógrafa U.Chile
msgg.gob.cl
Minister of the General Secretariat of Government -- Communist and Feminist

Estoy junto a @aoc … | Instagram

I’m joining @aoc and the Democratic Party of America delegation on their tour of Latin America to discuss public environmental policies, the global phenomenon of disinformation, and commemorating the #50AñosDelGolpe.

Thank you so much for your visit!

¡Qué gusto haber tenido … | Instagram

What a pleasure to have had the opportunity to chat with @aoc and with you on his visit to Chile!

Dear Alexandria, I hope this is the first of many visits to our country, and that we continue to dialogue and build a more just world for each and everyone

What did you think of the Live? I read your comments

With AOC and CVD speaking Spanish together.

AOC also Instagrammed

This is a entirely Spanish-speaking US Congressional delegation - possibly the first one ever in Latin America. I don't know that for sure, but everyone we've met with so far says they have never seen or heard of this before. People continue to be shocked that there's an entire US delegation capable of speaking a language a other than English!

I am fluent in exactly two languages, English and autotranslator, but I appreciate this sentiment.

 

[lpetrich]

AOC also met with the mayor of Santiago,  Irací Hassler and said about doing so that she felt pleased to be around politicians around her age, a sentiment she also had in Brazil, instead of politicians a generation older.

Una delegación de congresistas estadounidenses, … | Instagram

AOC met with President Gabriel Boric
Un honor recibir … | Instagram
(in the post itself, identical to Google Translate)

An honor to receive @AOC, @rep_velazquez, @JoaquinCastroTX, @GregCasar, @MaxwellFrostFL, and the team of Senator @BernieSanders. Together we share a common goal of a future with more democracy, social justice, and a deep respect for human rights. Thanks for your visit!

Instagram's autotranslator:

Honored to receive the visit of Congressmen @MaxwellFrostFL @AOC, @JoaquinCastroTX, and the team of Senator @rep_velazquez, Together we share the goal of a future with more democracy, social justice and a deep respect for human rights. Thanks for coming!

 

[lpetrich]

Rep. Ocasio-Cortez calls on US to declassify documents on Chile's 1973 coup | AP News

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Thursday in Chile that it was imperative for the United States to declassify documents that could shed light on Washington’s involvement in the South American country’s 1973 coup.

“The transparency of the United States could present an opportunity for a new phase in our relationship between the United States and Chile,” Ocasio-Cortez said in Spanish in a video posted on Instagram alongside Camila Vallejo, the spokesperson for the left-leaning government of President Gabriel Boric.

 973 Chilean coup d'état

The U.S. feared the example of a "well-functioning socialist experiment" in the region and exerted diplomatic, economic, and covert pressure upon Chile's elected socialist government.[29][30][31]

Back to AP News.

The goal of the trip was to “start to change … the relationships between the United States and Chile and the region, Latin America as a whole,” Ocasio-Cortez told outside the Museum of Memory and Human Rights that remembers the victims of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, who ruled from 1973 to 1990.

“It’s very important to frame the history of what happened here in Chile with Pinochet’s dictatorship. And also to acknowledge and reflect on the role of the United States in those events,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

 Museum of Memory and Human Rights

The Museum of Memory and Human Rights (in Spanish: Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos) is a museum in Santiago, Chile, which commemorates the victims of human rights violations during the military dictatorship led by Augusto Pinochet between 1973 and 1990. It was inaugurated by then-president Michelle Bachelet on January 11, 2010, as part of government's commemoration of the bicentennial of Chile.

AOC met  Michelle Bachelet also. She was President of Chile for 2006-2010 and 2014-2018, and United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights 2018-2022.

AP News again: Camila Vallejo, spokeswoman for Gabriel Boric:

“In Chile as well, a similar request was made … that aims to declassify documents from the Nixon administration, particularly certain testimonies from the CIA director. This is to attain a clearer understanding of what transpired and how the United States was involved in the planning of the civil and military coup, and the subsequent years that followed,” Vallejo said. “This is very important for our history.”

 

[lpetrich]

AOC and the Squad’s List of Left-Wing Accomplishments Is Quite Long by Branko Marcetic in Jacobin

It’s tough being a member of the “Squad” these days. Once the darlings of the American left, the group of progressive and socialist House members that includes Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Jamaal Bowman, and others are as likely to be savaged these days from the Left as they are from the Right. Popular YouTube commentators regularly denounce them as “sellouts,” protesters interrupt their meetings calling them warmongers, and even committed socialists question what the point of the Squad has been.

noting Don’t Look Now But Progressives Are About to Expand Their Ranks in Congress - In These Times
Back to the article.

The lion’s share of this ire has been trained on Representative Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who’s faced relentless criticism since winning office from all sides, sometimes over substantive issues (once failing to show up for an Amazon union rally, casting a vote that denied railworkers the ability to strike), sometimes over remarkably petty ones (conciliatory rhetoric, the positioning of her hands while being arrested).

Then that New York Magazine article by Freddie DeBoer, saying that she and her friends have failed.

Then arguing that her legislative record is not completely empty. Like Bernie Sanders, AOC introduces a lot of amendments.

For example, one successful 2019 amendment cut $5 million from the Drug Enforcement Administration budget and redirected it to treatment programs for the opioid crisis. A year later, she managed to get her repeal of the 1998 Faircloth Amendment passed through the House — a landmark vote and a longtime priority for affordable housing advocates, given the Bill Clinton–era measure’s effective ban on new public housing construction. Another from 2022 mandated the Pentagon study the therapeutic uses of MDMA and hallucinogens.

The Progressive Squad has also blocked some stuff.

Sean Vitka, policy counsel for Demand Progress, told Jacobin the Squad, and particularly Representative Tlaib (D-MI), were instrumental in a major 2019 victory against mass surveillance, when they forced through the end of the Patriot Act’s Section 215.

 

[lpetrich]

A section on "Anti-Imperialist Assists" starting off by some left-wingers claiming that AOC and her Squad friends are imperialist warmongers because they support Ukraine.

Take Latin America, for instance. Ocasio-Cortez was, after Omar, the second member of Congress to declare the 2019 Bolivian coup what it was: a coup — beating even Sanders by a couple of hours and staking out a position that’s somehow still a minority opinion in US politics. In fact, she went further, introducing an amendment banning the transfer of weapons and crowd control equipment to the coup regime, language that made it into the bill that passed the House.

Then about Colombia.

In 2022, two of Ocasio-Cortez’s amendments made it into the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that passed the House: one directing the State Department to produce a report on US involvement in human rights violations during the country’s decades-long civil war, and another prohibiting any Pentagon involvement in anti-narcotic aerial fumigation operations in the country, which have contaminated water sources and caused serious health problems for Colombians.

Also,

As Peru’s security services cracked down on anti-government protests that followed the December impeachment and arrest of leftist ex-president Pedro Castillo, Ocasio-Cortez and four other Squad members were among the twenty House progressives who signed a letter in January this year calling on President Joe Biden to end security assistance to the country. This past July, six weeks after further US troops and weapons landed in the country, Ocasio-Cortez introduced another NDAA amendment, this one suspending Pentagon funding for Peru until certain conditions were met.

...
All or some of the Squad have signed onto letters: condemning Donald Trump’s sanctions on and threats of military intervention in Venezuela; calling for the lifting of sanctions on the country, as well as on Cuba and Iran; denouncing repression by Ecuador’s right-wing, Trump-supported government; warning the Organization of American States (OAS) away from further coup shenanigans in Bolivia’s 2020 election; and threatening to condition military aid to Israel. Ocasio-Cortez’s name was the common denominator on all those letters.

Likewise, she was one of only four members of both the House and Senate to sign a letter in 2021 calling on Biden to pressure Saudi Arabia to lift its deadly blockade of Yemen, and one of only five to sign on to a Tlaib-led letter calling on Biden’s attorney general to drop the charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. No GOP equivalent exists, even though it’s far more perilous for Democrats to take this stance.

Nice to have someone like that in Congress.

 

[lpetrich]

Then about Israel. AOC fumbled an answer in an interview not long after she won her first primary.

Critics justifiably criticize Ocasio-Cortez’s “present” vote on Iron Dome funding in 2021. But this assessment should be balanced out by acknowledging her other, similarly symbolic actions that cut the other way. That includes her refusal to vote to condemn the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign while cosponsoring a pro-BDS resolution, her labeling Israel an “apartheid state” as early as 2021, as well as her and the Squad’s recent decisions to boycott the Israeli president’s speech to Congress and be one of only nine to vote against a resolution declaring Israel is neither an apartheid nor racist state. All of these are politically risky actions, especially when pro-Israel money has emerged as a real threat to reelection.

Even when Ocasio-Cortez has fallen short on the issue, she’s shown that she’s responsive to criticism from the Left, as when she backed out of a Yitzhak Rabin memorial event after an outcry from BDS activists. That’s not to mention the contributions other Squad members have made to shifting the Israel-Palestine discourse in the United States, which is slowly but surely turning toward the Left.

Squad members have been willing to work with Republicans about withdrawing troops from Syria and Somalia, Republicans like Matt Gaetz.

AOC is one of the few signers of the Ukraine pro-diplomacy letter who continues to publicly stand behind that letter, and the entire Squad voted against sending cluster munitions to that country. "Most recently, as anti-China fervor has taken over even progressive Democrats, the Squad were the only seven members of Congress to vote against a bill escalating Trump’s erosion of the One China policy, and all but one voted against creating the GOP’s anti-China select committee."

 

[lpetrich]

AOC and other Squad members are very responsive to labor unions and activist groups, despite the controversy about the railroad-union deal late last year, a deal that only one Squad member voted against: Rashida Tlaib. AOC has also showed up at several labor-union events, even skipping a Biden inauguration event to show up at one, even though she failed to show up for an Amazon Labor Union event.

“Alexandria herself, in her first few weeks in office, reached out to me and came to my office for a meeting. She’s the only member of Congress who’s ever done that,” says Association of Flight Attendants-CWA president Sara Nelson.

“She was here for two hours, talking through issues, trying to learn what was important to us,” Nelson adds. Ocasio-Cortez has solicited information from and worked with the union to try to ensure its priorities were represented through the Federal Aviation Authority’s reauthorization process.

Sara Nelson showed up at the early-1989 national town hall on the Green New Deal that headlined AOC.

Also,

“I have her chief of staff on my cell phone,” says deputy director of Food and Water Action Mitch Jones. “We’ve found her office to be responsive when we need them to be.”

She's worked with activists on some housing bills, like a Green New Deal for Public Housing.

“She held a number of town halls that were well-attended and carried the message that we need stronger rent control laws,” says Housing Justice for All campaign coordinator Cea Weaver. “She played the same role in our eviction moratorium and ‘cancel rent’ campaign during 2020 and 2021.”

Also,

Last year, Squad members also took part in a civil disobedience action over the overturning of Roe v. Wade that saw her and sixteen other members of Congress arrested, and where Ocasio-Cortez was criticized for faking being handcuffed by holding her hands behind her back — even though that was exactly what the organization had trained them to do, to show they weren’t resisting arrest.

“It was ridiculous. You can’t win no matter what,” says Mejia of the criticism.

 

[lpetrich]

Finally, there’s the somewhat more nebulous role Ocasio-Cortez and the Squad have played in the political shifts of the past few years.

This reminds me of  Cyclical theory (United States history) -- the US has alternated between liberal and conservative eras, between concern with the wrongs of the many and the rights of the few, between increasing and containing democracy, between public purpose and private interest, and between concern with human rights and with property rights. It's very evident to me where AOC stands and what she wants to achieve -- she's squarely on the liberal side.

It's easy to recognize in retrospect these eras and their transitions, but not so easy when one is living in them. The early years of transitions might not seem like much change, for instance.

Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal resolution might be one of the most impactful pieces of legislation that never became law. Simply by generating the level of publicity and debate it did — something hard to imagine without her involvement — the measure has directly inspired similar versions at the state and city levels and even in other countries. Similarly, shortly after she introduced her national fracking ban, the New York state legislature permanently banned fracking via legislation, preventing a future governor’s reversal by executive order.

AOC succeeded where the Green Party failed -- that's the difference between running for Congress as a Democrat and supporting vanity Presidential runs.

It’s hard to imagine the few but important climate victories that wound up in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) happening without the Green New Deal, Ocasio-Cortez labeling climate change an “existential” threat, and actions like her joining the Sunrise Movement’s sit-in at Pelosi’s office, which together helped shoot the perennially ignored climate crisis up the list of media and political priorities while legitimizing progressive policies to meet it.

 

[lpetrich]

More than that, a number of popular pandemic-era policies had antecedents in or received crucial public support from the Squad. ...

In fact, from the very start of the pandemic, Ocasio-Cortez called for direct cash payments, a pause on student loan repayments, mortgage relief, and a moratorium on evictions, all of which soon became core, popular parts of Trump and then Biden’s pandemic responses.

Then "Resisting Despair"

Left-wing scrutiny of the Squad and particularly Representative Ocasio-Cortez has steadily veered from constructive criticism and needed pressure to a kind of caricaturish vitriol — one that magnifies the ways they’ve fallen short, while saying nothing about their accomplishments nor their usefulness to activist and workers’ movements. Sometimes, you suspect the most unfair critics have taken their anger and frustration at the conservative, corporate-controlled political system in which they have to operate, and simply redirected it at the congresswoman herself.