Just Saying | Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign to make the super rich pay higher taxes should inspire us all, even if it’s doomed to fail
- Yonden Lhatoo hails a growing campaign in American politics to force the ultra-rich to pay higher taxes, even if the reformers pushing for a fairer system may never win their idealistic war
What a breath of fresh air and dose of extra energy Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is.
It’s been barely a month since she took up her new job as the representative for New York’s 14th district, and the youngest woman in history to be elected to the US Congress is making waves – just waves right now, but hopefully a tsunami some day.
This week, the 29-year-old upstart from the Bronx took just three minutes at a House Oversight Committee hearing to educate Americans on the sorry state of their campaign finance system, and how it’s broken and wide open to rampant abuse.
Role-playing the “bad guy” in an impromptu “Corruption Game” with ethics experts, Ocasio-Cortez, in a series of lightning-round questions, exposed the non-existence of regulations to prevent lawmakers from being fully funded and controlled by big corporations and other vested interests.
“So I and every member of this body are being held to a higher ethical standard than the president of the United States,” she concluded, effectively calling out Donald Trump over his dodgy business dealings and refusal to release his tax returns as well as his failure to keep his much-hyped campaign promise to “drain the swamp”.