When you hate capitalism so much that you don’t care about job losses

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Promoted from the diaries by streiff. Promotion does not imply endorsement.
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I have said previously that we should do what we can to ignore Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY 14^th District), because not doing so only adds to her fame. Kind of like publicizing the names of school shooters, it gives her what she wants. But sometimes she does and says something so stupid that it cannot be ignored:

Anything is possible: today was the day a group of dedicated, everyday New Yorkers & their neighbors defeated Amazon’s corporate greed, its worker exploitation, and the power of the richest man in the world. https://t.co/nyvm5vtH9k

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 14, 2019

Miss Ocasio-Cortez was celebrating the decision of Amazon to pull out of the proposed deal to build one of its new headquarters sites in the Long Island City neighborhood in Queens, a borough of New York City. Locating the headquarters there would have led to the creation of 25,000 jobs:

Opponents, including freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), protested that the influx of Amazon employees, to be paid an average salary of at least $150,000 a year, would cause housing costs to skyrocket, drive out low-income residents and worsen congestion on the subway and streets.

They also objected to the up to $3 billion in state and local incentives promised to Amazon, the world’s most valuable company headed by Jeffrey P. Bezos, the world’s wealthiest person.

Miss Ocasio-Cortez’s district borders the area in which Amazon’s “HQ2” would have been located. I guess that she wants Queens’ residents to be poorer rather than more prosperous; perhaps she believes that it’s better for her to keep more of them on welfare?

Even such liberals as Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) and MSNBC’s Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough slammed Miss Ocasio-Cortez’s stupidity:

It seems the hosts of Morning Joe are not happy with the end of Amazon’s planned New York headquarters, and they’re taking Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) to task.

Host Joe Scarborough in a segment Friday lamented the death of the project and blamed people who “don’t even understand basic economics,” per Mediaite. Scarborough later said he found it “remarkable” to see Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) “cheering … the loss of 25,000 high-paying jobs.” He pointed to infrastructure improvements and said that the deal would have made New Yorkers’ commutes easier.

Guest Donny Deutsch went even further, calling Ocasio-Cortez “extremely dangerous at this point.” She “does not know what she is talking about,” he said, arguing that the “new fresh progressive faces” like her are going to “hand the presidency back to Donald Trump.”

The panel’s other guest, Republican strategist Susan Del Percio, agreed, saying Ocasio-Cortez has demonstrated “how little she understands” about economics and unemployment, also arguing she doesn’t care about the people she represents because “those people would be getting jobs as well.”

Co-host Mika Brzezinski capped things off by complaining about young representatives who “don’t have the experience,” urging Ocasio-Cortez to “follow some of the more successful, more mature” members of Congress.

Well, of course she doesn’t know what she’s talking about; she’s a socialist! She cheered anti-Semitic Representative Ilhan Omar’s (D-MN 5^th District) attacks on Elliot Abrams, the Trump Administrations special envoy on Venezuela. Miss Ocasio-Cortez’s Democratic Socialists of America called President Trump’s decision to recognize National Assembly President Juan Guaidó as the constitutionally appropriate leader of Venezuela a “U.S.-backed coup,” even though the United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil and Colombia, and most other Latin American nations have also recognized the opposition leader. Miss Ocasio-Cortez herself didn’t address the issue, personally, but retweeted Representative Ro Khanna’s (D-CA 17^th District) tweet:

With respect Senator Durbin, the US should not anoint the leader of the opposition in Venezuela during an internal, polarized conflict. Let us support Uruguay, Mexico, & the Vatican’s efforts for a negotiated settlement & end sanctions that are making the hyperinflation worse. https://t.co/qoAb2ou95g

— Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) January 24, 2019

Socialism has failed, everywhere it has been tried, and Venezuela is the worst example of it; while most of the socialist countries were not wealthy in the first place, Venezuela has the largest proven petroleum reserves in the world, and was a large oil exporter, and socialism still failed there. Even with, in effect, importing the wealth of other nations, the socialism of Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro has taken what was once the most prosperous nation in South America and transformed it into what President Trump called a [insert slang term for feces here]hole country.

Miss Ocasio-Cortez, clearly the most charismatic of the new “progressive” Democrats — 74% of Democrats said that they would “consider” voting for her for President, and 17% said they would definitely do so — is an idiot, but her stupidity does not make her less dangerous. She knows nothing about economics, to the extent that she slams “the richest man in the world,” even though the richest man in the world was going to bring 25,000 high-paying jobs to her home city, and already provides jobs for 566,000, over half a million, people.¹

But, for the socialists, rich people creating jobs is not a good thing, but a problem. The socialists prefer poverty, because it is poor nations, not wealthy ones, which are more likely to become socialist. The only problem with that is, once they become socialist, they stay poor nations.

Socialism has, however, achieved one thing it promises, far greater equality of income; socialism has produced the equality of poverty, keeping the vast majority of the people subject to it very poor.²
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¹ – More than that, Amazon also has contracts which employ even more people. Many local United States Post Offices are the contract delivery service for Amazon, requiring more USPS employees and more hours for those who already worked there. My younger daughter worked for the Post Office in Versailles, Kentucky, and said that the overtime was very good, and that they were working seven days a week. I have also seen employees of the Irvine, Kentucky Post Office out on Sundays, delivering Amazon shipments.
² – Though Miss Ocasio-Cortez said that she was worried about having to rent an apartment in the very expensive Washington DC area, she managed to do so, in the luxury Navy Yard area, in which even studio apartments cost more than $2,000 a month.

Affording a second residence in the capital has proven to be a challenge for lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, with some choosing to live together with colleagues or to bunk up in their congressional office as cost-saving measures.

Ocasio-Cortez’s home district residence is a Bronx apartment that was purchased in 1986 by her father, who died from cancer in 2008. She has lived there with her partner since graduating from Boston University in 2011, she has said.

City records show the mortgage on the Bronx apartment was satisfied in June 2007, leaving her only responsible for monthly contributions to home-owner association fees and property taxes, which an office spokesperson says were between $750 and $1,000 a month.

In other words, Miss Ocasio-Cortez was living in a free apartment in Queens, paying only taxes and HOA fees, which, incidentally, cost more than my mortgage payments in the only houses on which I ever had a mortgage. (We bought our farm cash, and have no mortgage currently).
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Cross-posted on The First Street Journal.

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