AOC: Congress Put ‘Gasoline’ on Coronavirus Fire After Seeing ‘Racial Data’

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) this week accused the corporatist Congress of responding to the coronavirus crisis with “fire” instead of “water” as soon as lawmakers saw the “racial data” that revealed “working-class people and black and brown people” were being disproportionately impacted.

In an appearance on “Shelter in Place with Shane Smith” on Vice News, Ocasio-Cortez said Congress had an opportunity to address systemic inequalities and racism and heal the country.

Instead, according to the New York Democrat, the stimulus and bailout bills are only going to increase income inequality.

“This is absolutely going to make income inequality worse. There is no question. And it did not have to be this way,” she said. “This crisis could have ushered in an era of public policy that really healed. But we aren’t doing that. What we are doing is that we are kind of responding to a fire instead of with water, we are responding to it with gasoline.”

Ocasio-Cortez, noting that even corporatist Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) favored cash payments to Americans, said politicians on both sides were signaling they were ready to embrace more progressive policies until “the racial data came out” and “showed that” the coronavirus was “disproportionately impacting working class people and black and brown people”:

Coronavirus presents an opportunity for the United States to actually catch up with the developed world, with the rest of the developed world in health care guarantees, in wages and jobs. But it is being squandered. When the stay at home orders were first issued, we saw a massive shift in the direction of progressive policy. You had Mitt Romney talking about a universal basic income. And then a couple of interesting things happened. It felt like once the racial data came out that showed that this was disproportionately impacting working class people and black and brown people, it was almost like within days a lot of those ambitions just fell. But when we didn’t know who it was going to impact, when all of us felt vulnerable, we were ready to change. And I think that, at the very least, should be a moment of reflection for our country.

Ocasio-Cortez added that the “coronavirus has just blown open systemic inequality that has been long simmering in the United States” and more progressive policies are needed to address the underling “systemic inequality.”

“And so if people want to help, they need to support single payer health care in the United States,” she said. “We need to stand up and actually be comfortable talking about systemic and institutionalized racism in the United States. But so long as we’re not ready for these conversations, we’re not going to be able to address these issues.”