Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: “You Can’t Earn A Billion Dollars,” You Have To Create A Myth Of Earning It
On the podcast “It’s Open with Ilana Glazer,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) argued that a person cannot earn a billion dollars, so they “have to create a myth of earning it.”
REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ (D-NY): I have always felt that America has always been a place of two stories. ILANA GLAZER, HOST: Yes. OCASIO-CORTEZ: It has always been a place where of, you know, where we’ve seen the worst of humanity and the best of humanity and witnessing the triumphs of the best of us over the worst of what we’ve seen, I think is also a very big part of who we are. And so when it comes to ICE, I think it’s where both of these elements meet because in an era of extreme income inequality, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this xenophobia and anti-immigrant feeling is happening at the same time as record levels of income inequality. I also feel this way about Jim Crow and racism and all of this stuff, which is that when there is so much economic insecurity, I don’t wanna say it’s a driver, right? I wanna be very clear about that. But I wanna say that in the mix of deep racism and all of this, in the mix of that, when you feel like you could be next, when you feel like you are one accident away from losing your house and losing everything, you kind of, there is the lesser impulse of us is to subjugate or to feel like there is another class of people that is below you, that I’m not bad, right? Our systems require us, capitalism and what have you, our society requires us to internalize the failures of our systems, to your point, right? It’s not the school that failed the kids, it’s that you’re the dropout. It’s not that Walmart pays less than a living wage, it’s that I’m poor and I didn’t work hard enough so I didn’t earn a better station than I earned in my life. GLAZER: It’s clean out your yogurt containers to recycle them rather than tax fossil fuel companies. OCASIO-CORTEZ: That’s right. GLAZER: Oy. OCASIO-CORTEZ: And so what happens is like, when you have these systems, when you have corporations, when you have an economic elite, they have not, there’s a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned, right? You can’t earn a billion dollars. GLAZER: That’s right. OCASIO-CORTEZ: You just can’t earn that. GLAZER: That’s exactly correct. OCASIO-CORTEZ: You can get market power, you can break rules, you can do all sorts of things. You can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn that, right? GLAZER: That’s right. OCASIO-CORTEZ: And so you have to create a myth that since you didn’t earn that, you have to create a myth of earning it. And so if you’re making minimum wage at a Walmart and you’re making seven bucks an hour, and I mean, damn, with these gas prices, it takes you seven bucks to get to work. GLAZER: That’s right. OCASIO-CORTEZ: And so as a result, we’ve kind of internalized this moralized system, right? The people at the top are smarter, better, more sophisticated, and therefore the people at the bottom are uneducated, lazy, et cetera. And so if you are there, and if you have internalized that code, you need somebody under you because you feel like you are kind of good. And the truth is most like you are, right? But if you’ve internalized that, you need someone to point to that’s broken the rules, that’s lazy, that’s whatever, because in a way it’s like someone else has got to be locked up so that you’re not.
