Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) on Monday delivered a message to billionaires, stating that the people want their “power” — not their money.
The New York lawmaker spoke at the Blackout for Human Rights: MLK Now 2020 in Harlem’s Riverside Church on Monday, stating that if billionaires want to be ethical, they should relinquish their power.
“If Jeff Bezos wants to be a good person, you turn Amazon into a worker cooperative,” she said to cheers. “You know, like what do I do with all this money that I have created with this unjust system?”
“And if — usually if you’re a billionaire, that means that you control a massive system. It means that you own oil supplies. It means that you control textiles. It means that you have a massive labor force under your control,” she continued.
“And to be ethical, if you’re a billionaire today, the thing that you need to do is give up control and power. So I don’t want your money as much as we want your power. The people. Not me,” she clarified:
Ocasio-Cortez also lamented the state of the Democrat Party, contending that it is not progressive enough — a complaint she has issued before.
“We don’t have a left party in the United States. The Democratic Party is not a left party,” she proclaimed. “The Democratic Party is a center or a center-conservative party.”
“We can’t even get a floor vote on Medicare For All — not even a floor voted that gets voted down,” she said. “We can’t even get a vote on it. So this is not a left party. There are left members inside the Democratic Party that are working to try to make that shift happen.”
The far-left lawmaker has endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), another socialist whose campaign has largely focused on demonizing the wealthy. Sanders, however, is a millionaire himself.