What Ocasio-Cortez and the Populist Left Get Right

Tucker Carlson nicely sums up what Ocasio-Cortez actually gets right about the present state of America:

“So how did she get so famous? Why do people like her? Well, if we are being honest, we’ve got to say it’s because not everything she says is wrong. See how, in this same town hall, Ocasio-Cortez takes a break from her idiotic climate theology to offer what turns out to be a fairly insightful critique of the American economy.

“We have runaway income inequality. We are at one of our most in-equal points, economically speaking, in American history,” she said. “We are dealing with a crisis of how our economy is even made up. Our economy is increasingly financialized, which means we are making profits off of interest — off leasing your phone, off of doing all of these things. But we aren’t producing, and we aren’t innovating in the way that we need to as an economy.”

The annual incremental updates to the iPhone do not count as “innovation.”

“No other party wants to talk about this. The Republicans are in fetal position; they just don’t want to be unpopular anymore. They will do anything not to be unpopular. The Democrats want what they have always wanted – total and complete control over you and this country. Neither party will say that our economy, at its core, is badly distorted. Any economy based on interest payments isn’t really an economy. It’s a scam.”

Bingo.

“Healthy countries innovate. They make things. They don’t treat people like interchangeable widgets. They don’t worship finance. In a healthy country, bankers aren’t heroes. Private equity is not the highest paid profession. Nobody brags about working at a hedge fund. In America right now, we have the opposite, unfortunately. And that’s why Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a constituency — not because she is impressive, she is not. But because she is one of the very few people who will say the obvious about growing corporate tyranny in this country.

This doesn’t mean she is right about anything else. Taking power from the banks and giving it to Ocasio-Cortez, as she proposes, would not solve our problems. It will just put an even dumber person in charge. But she is right about the financialization part.

Freeing myself from the “intellectual” conformity of the “Pro-Business” right was one of the best things I’ve done recently: it has allowed me to see clearly that government is not the root of all evil in this country. It’s Big Business married to Big Government that is truly the problem, and yet millions of Conservatives cannot admit this because they have been indoctrinated to worship the “free market”.

Since I no longer consider myself a “Conservative,” I am free to agree with Elizabeth Warren in saying we absolutely should break up the big tech monopolies, although I’m sure we disagree on the exact reasons why. I no longer have to sit here and pretend Wall Street is Awesome and that it contributes to the greater good.

Yes, Ocasio-Cortez is largely a dumbass who mostly deserves ridicule, but on this she’s right: our economy is wildly distorted.

And yes, the “financialization” of the economy largely began under Reagan.

Stuff like this gives me a glimmer of hope that perhaps the right and left can actually come together to challenge the Uniparty Quadrumvirate of Washington, Wall Street, the Corporate Media and Silicon Valley.

But then I realize that the grassroots left’s answer to corporate usury and monopolization is socialism.

And the fact that they’re fully-on board with flooding America with foreigners and turning it into a third-world shithole–there’s no compromising with them on that.

Still, there’s got to be some common ground we can work with.

Economic populism transcends left and right.