AOC’s Leftist Sabotage Is Coming Home to Roost

U.S. cities burn while social justice warriors fiddle.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez holds a meeting in New York July 6, 2023 (Steve Sanchez Photos/Shutterstock)

Recent public complaints by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) that New York costs too much for the working class (and should increase taxes on wealthier residents!) are rubbing salt in the wounds of her strident opposition to Amazon locating its headquarters in the city in 2019. A pattern of urban sabotage by social justice Democrats is causing major U.S. cities to experience accelerating economic decline. Despite their efforts to blame white conservatives for this suicidal display, Americans see the true causes.

Chicago and Los Angeles have also chased profitable businesses from town while courting illegal denizens, driving up housing costs, and defunding police forces. Gov. Gavin Newsom faces stifling, nosebleed state deficits even as he tours the world touting the far-left policies that seeded California’s economic failure as a national recipe for social progress. Efforts to blame these gargantuan failures on Republicans fall on deaf ears. This is an economic activity of the social justice kind: Marxist deconstruction.

More Jobs Don’t Equal Less Investment

AOC has an economics degree from Boston University, but her public attacks against Amazon in 2019 suggest she needs further studies. She posted on X, formerly Twitter:

Amazon is a billion-dollar company. The idea that it will receive hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks at a time when our subway is crumbling and our communities need MORE investment, not less, is extremely concerning to residents here. It’s possible to establish economic partnerships [with] real opportunities for working families, instead of a race-to-the-bottom competition.

AOC’s upside-down pseudo-economics charged that Amazon was somehow going to suck money out of government coffers, but those tax breaks were offsets against much larger revenue receipts. Amazon’s massive investments in New York would have contributed not only revenue to repair subways but also more taxpaying workers to ride to reliable jobs: Amazon’s 25–40,000 well-paid workers would have owed city and state taxes on their incomes even if they commuted from New Jersey.

Amazon’s proposal was an “economic partnership [with] real opportunities for working families.” AOC pushes rent controls, reckless illegal immigration, higher taxes on residents, and reduced police funding, then cries foul when the resulting economic destruction unfolds. She recently doubled down, claiming that wealthy taxpayers are not fleeing New York City (they are) and that higher taxes will benefit the middle class she has destroyed: “The people who are moving out of the city are not by and large the wealthiest people. They’re the working class. They can’t afford to live here anymore.”

Marxists Like AOC Are Deconstructing the Economy

AOC has not created economic opportunities for anyone but ideological grifters. New York City is in economic and social freefall. The emergency room patient is being moved to the ICU, and its killer remains at large. Those jobs for working-class people who can “no longer afford” New York were generously offered by Amazon, then forcefully jilted by AOC, who claimed that achievement as a victory on X:

Today was the day a group of dedicated, everyday New Yorkers and their neighbors defeated Amazon’s corporate greed, its worker exploitation and the power of the richest man in the world.

Instead, hundreds of thousands of undocumented, unemployed migrants have collected in New York City, exploited by Democrats who have no more plans to feed or provide for them than they do for the working-class families being displaced and economically decimated by foolish economic initiatives. This pattern of economic destruction reflects the Marxist ideological policy of deconstruction — tearing down the economy, schools, families, and everything else that is decent to implement the farcically imagined utopia that will guarantee that “everyone has everything” while doing (and owning) nothing. 

America’s three largest cities are witnessing a massive exodus of businesses, investments, taxpayers, and tax receipts as a direct consequence of reckless policies of overt economic and social sabotage. The instigators of this economic destruction are unrepentant in their shameless disconnect from the working class they claim they are liberating. 

How much worse can it get?

(Previously published at American Spectator.)