Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tells NPR: 'Everything feels increasingly like a scam'
Summary
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 35-year-old veteran lawmaker, spoke to NPR about her party’s path forward.
She predicts Republicans will face backlash over Medicaid cuts and federal worker firings.
Despite some Democrats suggesting a new immigration approach post-election, she maintains support for a path to citizenship and recently held a know-your-rights seminar that drew threats of investigation from Trump's border czar Tom Homan.
AOC told NPR "everything feels increasingly like a scam" for ordinary Americans while government serves the wealthy well.
Unlike Trump, she opposes drastically cutting government agencies but questions programs like Medicare Advantage.
https://www.kpbs.org/news/politics/2025/02/28/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-tells-npr-everything-feels-increasingly-like-a-scamOpen linkView original on lemmy.world648
Comments83
It is a scam. Neo liberals control the democratic party and they serve the elite. They were never going to save us.
We need a true populist movement. The parties haven't served us my entire life.
Some would say, "we need to seize the means of production," even.
Grab 'em by the means of production
They just let you do it when you're rich
socialism yes. communism no. Communists are just as corrupt as the capitalists. We arent limited to just capitalism or communism, why pick from failed strategies?
Communism is a stateless, classless society, and more like a utopian end-goal to strive for. But, yeah, parties that label themselves communist tend to be of the authoritarian type. Failure of certain strategies and implementations doesn't mean an entire ideology is bad. Democracy failed with Rome, and wasn't implemented on a large scale again for ~1800 years; and I think most people consider democracy a pretty good system now.
I'm 40 years old and I have never felt represented by my government.
A 40 year old would have been born in 1985. No president has been born after 1961. If you exclude Obama, no president has been born after 1945.
What do you mean? Musk was born in '71.
Man, that's bleak.
55 here and it's been the same
You change the parties the way the Tea Party and Maga changed the Republicans. You start a faction and then work on taking over the existing party.
This could be the right way. Unless Democrats cease to exist in their current form they will never save us from the greed machine.
The tea party changed republicans by being belligerent assholes that refused to play along with old GOP leadership. I'm not sure that the left in the US has it in them to do that to the DNC.
State level electoral reform will allow 3rd parties to participate in elections without a spoiler effect. We don't need to wait a decade for the old shits in the DNC to die of natural causes. It is possible, Alaska already has passed electoral reform. We can do this before the mid terms.
::: spoiler Videos on Electoral Reform
First Past The Post voting (What most states use now)
Videos on alternative electoral systems we can try out.
STAR voting
Alternative vote
Ranked Choice voting
Range Voting
Single Transferable Vote
Mixed Member Proportional representation :::
Maybe this is a hot take, but why don’t we just make all the law abiding undocumented immigrants legal and just move the fuck on? We need a party that will focus on healthcare and education the most as those two things will create a better society in the long run. Having these other individuals able to fully participate in society could be helpful in many ways as well.
racism
bEcAuSe ThAt WoUlD bE uNfAiR tO tHoSe WhO dId It ThE "rIgHt" WaY
Which is, of course, a completely bullshit argument. But it nonetheless gets trotted out any time there's a proposal to make something easier for anyone middle class or below.
Yeah, I love how that argument completely ignores all the other advantages that come along with 'doing it the right way'
It's like being on a cruise ship in the ocean that rescues some sailors in distress, and then someone gets pissed because the rescued people didn't buy a ticket like everyone else.
That's a very apt comparison, and I would bet cold hard cash that there are people who act exactly like that on a cruise.
Yes, and this is a key difference, on a cruise, that behavior in front of your fellow passengers will be seen in person, and shot down immediately by people with decency, any they would be looked on like total assholes and ostracized . There is no social media machine or group think on a cruise ship. They're are several hundred/thousand people confined to a limited space, and noteworthy events will still be transmitted the old fashioned away. From eyes to brain to mouth to ears to brain to mouth, and so on.
That's why I love using cruise ships for an analogy when I can. It strips away a lot of the bullshit strawman, what if's, and 'but this will happen's'
It helps highlight how actual human behavior often acts in opposition of the hive mind nonsense cultivated and propagated by News and social broadcast outlets that are owned by want to be oligarchs that view our rights as an obstruction to their God given right to rape the American people for profit
They jumped overboard. We all saw it.
One of the biggest problems in America is people thinking that suffering is a necessary part of human existence and people having what you have without suffering is an injustice, unless they're rich.
Every time a conservative sees someone getting help they assume it could have been money in their pockets instead. It's sick zero-sum thinking and betrays a total lack of understanding of financial appropriations, tax, really everything, reality even.
As a general advertisement, not even asking for money, liberal groups should send "fake checks" to people and say:
Do you think the donors to the democrats would approve?
Why not? When it comes down to it, they know democrats have their backs.
They hate on California for having broad healthcare access for the public because it's ''socialism'', but the reason California extended coverage so far is that study after study made it clear that if you don't cover the tooth ache, you will have to cover the root canal, or three ER visit for sepsis, or an ICU stay. We know giving people healthcare, cost less money then letting them get life threatening medical consequences. They also like to point to homelessness as though homelessness is a sign of total ineptitude, when R states literally forcibly transport their homeless to SF and LA. And the stat they don't realize they are pointing at, it's the number of homeless people in homeless shelters that CA maintains for a lot of money, but again. If there is no effort to keep people alive and well, you have to deal with the most expensive consequences. The RNC is the antithesis of keeping cost burden of the state low, and actual governing.
Well, according to Trump, the way they did it isn't 'the right way' either. Otherwise they wouldn't be trying to block birthright citizenship.
But hey, expecting a Conservative to wrap their head around an abstract concept is... well, let's just say these are people who need pictures.
"I would explain it to you, but I don't have the time or crayons to do so"
That's what Regan and HW Bush did. But they're all against it now.
One big reason is because minorities tend to be left leaning. This is one of the reasons people are against Puerto Rico becoming a state.
Remember when fucking Reagan gave amnesty to a bunch of people? Ronald Reagan was the biblical devil, and trump is still worse.
If they pay taxes and don't do crime I don't really care who they are or where they are from.
Without doing any googling to double check, I'm almost certain that I've heard that was already kinda sorta tried. Ofc, it didn't fix the problem because the exploitive system that creates the conditions for illegal immigration remained, and the government has only made it worse since then. Imo, the only true fix that doesn't involve dumb fucking bullshit is massively loosening our immigration constraints and allowing people to live here as long as they don't start shit.
To be clear, I'm against immigration controls period, but this is me trying to be practical.
Pathway to citizen hasn't been tried because it hasn't been able to get the necessary coalition to pass.
Remember: If it feels like a scam, it is.
Ever try to buy car insurance?
I just bought car insurance. Switched from USAA to Progressive and saved a shitload. USAA hasn't been a good deal for a while now.
THAT SAID - Progressive is always trying to get me to turn on "accident detection" on my phone. Fuck that, I know exactly what they do with that data, it's not happening.
I have to deal with progressive all the time. They are total shit. A step above the general.
They're all shit. I used to manage a body shop.
Really? USAA is still the best even when I shop around and they actually gave me money back last year.
I've had USAA for over a decade. I never looked at other quotes because I knew USAA had the best coverage. Until my premium kept increasing despite a flawless history. I searched around, progressive had the best quote. I now have better coverage than before (I matched everything first, then increased as I saw fit) and pay significantly less.
Interesting. I'll take another look this year. USAA actually subcontracts progressive for motorcycle insurance so I also have progressive.
That was another reason I went with progressive, my motorcycle is covered under them.
All insurance is a scam.
Game of Thrones should have taught you that.
Yeah I’ve been saying this for a few months now, we are officially in “The Age of the Grifter.” Honestly it makes me a little sick this is what we’ve been reduced to.
Everything's been a scam for a while especially this bullshit society. Capitalism inherently encourages and drives everything towards scamming people gotta "make profit" and no one dare dictate what's egregious or not because "who are you to say" so there is just no limit to the greed whatsoever. Cutting corners/costs can only go so far until the planes start falling out of the sky or however that saying goes. We're past the terminal end stages of capitalism and they have no remedy for it and we're seeing the cancer mutate in to something else now.
Our gov is taking our tax money and not showing us what they are doing with it. If its not a scam, show us where the money is going.
Our gov is showing us what they do with the tax money. It is, in fact, all public information you can get with a couple seconds of digging (and has been that way for a LONG time).
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/federal-spending/
The only real black boxes of the government are military and espionage spending. Everything else is out in the open.
That military black box is massive, and the pentagon hasn’t successfully completed one of its past seven audits. This is a prime area for reform and cost cutting, and yet house repugs just voted to add another 100 billion to its budget.
AOC is correct, it’s a grift, and the billionaires and corporations are coming for what little we have left.
For quick context for why that is. If memory serves right they at least used to slash the budgets of units who didn't use said budget up completely. As you can imagine that results in a shit tonne of wasteful spending for literally no reason, just corpo run it like a shitty business crap
Does this include all the money that the government is giving to Elon Musk??
Yes. Our government is actually really transparent. Granted, a lot of this wasn't apparent until DOGE claimed to bring transparency, and then everything they did was shown to be redundant or worse with existing systems.
Even military isn't that opaque. The published numbers are HUGE.
I agree. But I absolutely do not trust the richest man in the world, who was not elected at all, in charge of those funds. Dude already has been using it to funnel money into his own projects. You’ve handed the keys to your safe to a known burglar, and now you’re offering him blowjobs as well.
Just not the uninformed shoddy lie filled way DOGE are.
This is a dumb take. It's publicly available information
No, I think the dumb thing to do would be to assume that the person who was convicted of 30+ felonies concerning a legal campaign financing is being fully transparent about his intentions and the amount of money he shifted over to the worlds, greatest billionaire(Musk). Also don’t forget that Donald Trump was convicted of a charity scandal and now he can’t run a charity inside the state of New York without court ordered supervision.
Those government reports should be 100% truthful but if you’re willing to believe that they are under Donald Trump, then I have a bridge to sell you .
It feels like it's a swing off the cancel movement and now everyone can just lie without any consequences.
Guys and gals, I have a solution, it involves a guillotine and...
You can chop heads forever and for all time but it will never decrease the number of scams and scammers. Regulations are the only solution.
Every time I read Tom Homan, I think of that cat walking around meme.
I read this as Alexandra Daddario and was really confused.
All she’d need to do to get people to listen to her is stare deeply into their eyes.
She also feels like a scam to me for using x and not having a mastodon account
Yeah why is this politician, who clearly finds it important to communicate her messages as widely and effectively as possible, using a massive social media platform which many American voters and basically all, if not all media organizations regularly use to get their information, instead of using some nobody social media platform that almost nobody cares about?!? The only conclusion is she must be a grifter!!!
Why yes I am incapable of thinking about a single subject for more than 5 seconds, why do you ask?
Why is she not even bothering creating a mastodon account?
She may literally not know it exists.
If you don't know an alternative to X in 2025 you sound like a scam to me
Because she could probably yell her political messages out of her window and reach more people?
Scammers goal is also to reach more people. Masodon is free and the best alternative to X, there aren't many excuses not to have an account
Yeah and it's also a politician's goal. Do you actually think everyone who wants to reach a lot of people is a scammer? Like there's no legitimate reason to want to reach as many people as possible? Did your parents drop on your head when you were young?
Someone with millions of follower already on meta and x who refuse to even create a mastodon account to me sound yet another corrupted politician or a scam
Maybe it's just me, but I've never seen anything of value posted on mastodon or Twitter. The format doesn't seem to create meaningful discussions
Everything is a scam?
Kind of like AOC voting to protect the rail corporation from a union strike, then presenting herself as a champion of the working class.
I hate Realpolitik, but she did that as part of a backroom deal with Pelosi.
AOC isn't perfect, but she truly does fight for us because she fights to change the system itself. Of the 435 elected House reps, she is easily the least corrupted of the entire lot. Her and Bernie are the best we have.
AOC is just another scam. Where was she for the past 4 years?
Pretty active and critical of the administrations actions. People just don't read anything but headlines and then only actually integrate into memory the negative ones conforming to their preferred world view.
As a NYer yeah, she's definitely been around. She's been fighting Adams a lot
Seriously?
That's what sheepdogs do, they lay low while the blue fascists are in charge and rear up once the red ones take control. Now that Republicans have shifted further to the right the DNC will fill the void left by Republicans.
Ratchet goes click click