It is clear that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the dragon slayer who defeated the guy who was on track to become Speaker of the House, is under attack from all sides. It is imperative that Establishment Democrats and organizations who go after her unjustly are made to understand that there will be a price to pay electorally and economically. How do we know the attacks are on on both sides including from Establishment Liberals? Read on.
We all knew the Right Wing would use every misstep by Ocasio-Cortez and hyper-amplify it. Unfortunately, publications that purport to be just reporting the news seem to be on the attack as well.
The Daily Caller wrote the following during the run up to the election to start “softening” the target to make Ocasio-Cortez seem uninformed.
New York Democratic congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claimed on Friday that the low unemployment rate is “part of the problem” of capitalism failing to help America’s working class because people think the economy is doing well when it’s not.
“The economy is going pretty strong … there’s roughly 4 percent, 3.9 percent unemployment,” Margaret Hoover, host of PBS’ “Firing Line,” told Ocasio-Cortez during an interview. “Do you think that capitalism has failed to deliver for working-class Americans?”
“Well, I think the numbers you just talked about is part of the problem, right?” Ocasio-Cortez said. “We look at these figures and we say, ‘Oh, unemployment is low, everything is fine, right?’”
Ocasio-Cortez also seemed to misunderstand the difference between unemployment and underemployment, asserting that unemployment is low because people are working multiple jobs.
“Unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs,” she said. “Unemployment is low because people are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week and can barely feed their family.”
Daily Caller
They completely missed the implication of her first statement which holds. If unemployment is so low, why are wages still so small and why haven’t wages tracked productivity and growth. That is a failure of capitalism. Here second statement correlating hours worked, and multiple jobs with the unemployment rate are wrong, the sentiment she is echoing is correct. Talking about low unemployment rates as working people continue to struggle is wrong. This type of nitpicking will continue from the Right will continue and has.
Unfortunately, even publications that are supposed to be straight reporting are instead of playing ‘gotcha’ reporting when addressing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s gaffes. That is a disservice to us all. Factcheck.org went after her for the following tweet.
They wrote the following.
Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted that $21 trillion worth of “Pentagon accounting errors” could finance two-thirds of Medicare for All. It can’t.
The misguided tweet is based on a tally by university researchers who found $21 trillion worth of untraceable transactions in the Department of Defense between 1998 and 2015. It’s a legitimate problem the Pentagon says it’s trying to fix. But transactions — which can be counted multiple times as they pass through accounts — are not the same as spending.
Really? WaPo rates Ocasio-Cortez’s Pentagon tweet bad as Trump’s biggest liesF
Suffice it to say, they missed the point. She was not truing to be an accountant. She was attempting to show that while trillions are either unaccounted for or miscalculated in the Pentagons spending, comparable scrutiny and concern for the money for social programs are always an issue. The fact the Pentagon story has not reached a scandal level is in itself a scandal.
Recently FAIR reported the unfair and biased treatment with a substantial degree of false equivalencies that Ocasio-Cortez is getting from supposedly legitimate media sources; in this case the Washington Post.
The Post’s headline (12/4/18) two days later was unquestioningly blunt: “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s $21 Trillion Mistake.” So had Ocasio-Cortez simply made up the $21 trillion number? No. Invented the study? Unfairly singled out the Pentagon? Bungled the math, inaccurately dividing 21 into 36? No, no and no.
Instead, in her tweet, she had failed to properly capture the fact that the missing Pentagon money included both inputs and outlays and, therefore, wasn’t a tranche of lost funds that could’ve been re-allocated to pay for Medicare for All, as she suggested. In fact, the Pentagon’s total budget over those 18 years was $9 trillion. It’s a key distinction, but that missing nuance led the Post to award this “$21 trillion mistake” its worst rating for dishonesty: “Four Pinocchios.”
Article
These media outlets likely with the blessing of both party establishments, given that she is getting incoming flak from all sides of the media are trying to make a caricature of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez because the policies she is promoting is where the American people are when asked for their wants and needs. Getting traction beyond her base is terrifying to both party establishments whose benefactors are in fact, the plutocracy. I wrote similarly on this issue in the article Progressive Independent media must have backs of young warriors like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that is worth reading. It is imperative that we all have this congresswoman’s back.