Feb 24, 2019 6 min read

Stop me if you have heard this one before. A barmaid from New York walks into the House of Representatives … Unfortunately, this is no joke because one did. No disrespect to New York barmaids, but this one has a mouth that won’t stop and a brain that won’t start. We are speaking, of course, about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the avowed socialist who has been in Congress less than two months and already has said more stupid things than most Congress critters manage in their careers.

It only took a couple days to determine the 28-year-old barmaid knows virtually nothing about anything. She knows nothing about economics, math, history, the Constitution, ancestry, racism, ringworm in Alabama or anything else she has commented on.

The challenge of limited intellectual capacity did not stop her from proposing one of the most absurd and ill-conceived programs in history, the Green New Deal.

Ocasio-Cortez is not new or unique. She is but the latest in a long succession of “The sky-is-falling, you-are-all-going-to-die” con artists. The list include practitioners from 18th century Thomas Malthus (Theory of Population) to Paul Erlich (“The Population Bomb”) to Al Gore (Carbon Credit huckster). Hype and hypocrisy are the common characteristics. All carry the message, “If you want to live, surrender complete control to the state.”

Joining the list of charlatans, Ocasio-Cortez proposed transforming America into a grand socialist republic in ways that would make Marx and Engels envious.

Her proposal generally patches together the wish lists of the climate change mafia and socialist economic dreamers.

She calls for a “10-year national mobilization” to accomplish her goals. This means drafting the nation’s entire work force to work on the government’s projects.

Among the more astounding goals are “meeting 100 percent of the nation’s power demands through non-fossil energy sources.” Not only does she advocate eliminating the use of fossil fuels but nuclear energy also. Here in Washington County, that would mean the elimination of all jobs in the energy industry including drilling, extraction, mining and transportation of fossil fuel. Her proposals included replacing or upgrading every building in America for energy efficiency, powering the nation with limitless wind farms and solar arrays, eliminating air travel by building high-speed rail lines “everywhere,” forcing people to become city dwellers, replacing gasoline and gas-driven cars with electric cars by closing gas stations and replacing them with charging stations, eliminating meat from our diets, guarantee living wage jobs for every American and Medicare for all. All this at a cost of untold trillions of dollars using technology that does not exist and employing resources beyond those available.

This moonbeam plan employs the concept of “Modern Monetary Theory” wherein the government just prints whatever money it needs and maintains monopoly control of every market. Inflation is controlled by taxing money away from people.

This plan is too insane to spend a lot of time dissecting but it is worth looking at a couple things since they reflect the current thinking of the radical left Democratic Party.

The Green New Deal is not about climate change, all the hype notwithstanding. It is about social justice issues. Three of the five goals in the grand plan go directly to social or economic “justice.” The other two goals use language inspired by the UN’s globalist and infamous Agenda 21 that pledged governments to “change the way people live, eat, learn and communicate” in the service of “saving the earth from mankind’s mistakes, specifically global warming.”

The Green New Deal plays to the radical left with frequent use of terms such as “sustainability,” “justice and equity,” “repairing historic repression,” “frontline and vulnerable communities” and “sustainable development.” This morphs the whole environmental concept into a “climate justice” framework. The climate justice advocates don’t bother to deny any longer that their approach to climate change is political and about wealth redistribution rather than being truly focused on the environment. This is the radical socialist agenda wearing different lipstick.

The Green New Deal may fool some as being an environmental effort, but it is assuredly not. It is a socialist manifesto – a poorly thought-out one – but the intent is ominous because this is how our elected Democrats are thinking.

A “green economy” and the “social justice” measures proposed can never generate enough revenue to sustain themselves. Inept politicians like Ocasio-Cortez, and probably the 70 Democrats who also signed on to this unicorn story, hope to identify those who, in their minds, have been treated unfairly for special consideration within these measures so that it appears these are “justice” programs. As several wags have pointed out, by the time one adds up all the “oppressed groups,” the only people excluded from the benefits seem to be middle-aged, employed white males.

A few observations about GND:

First, the GND proposes the impossible: that is rebuilding everything in America. That couldn’t be accomplished in 10 years or 100 years. Long before this plan got very far along, the economy would collapse and economic chaos would rule. This is inevitable with socialist economies. Government command economy has never successfully replaced free market supply and demand.

Second, Ocasio-Cortez and the Democrats regularly assume that the U.S .is the only source of CO2 emissions and if we eliminate our emissions, the problem is solved. The U.S. actually produces about 14 percent of the world’s CO2 and is reducing that as we go more toward the use of natural gas. That means that 86 percent of the world’s CO2 emissions are generated elsewhere and we would have little impact by ourselves.

Third, the Green New Deal is really not focused on climate change even though it invokes climate words. It is the agent of socialism and the redistribution of wealth.

The Green New Deal proposes phony solutions to phony problems for the express purpose of destroying America and creating a socialist tyranny.

Take a good look now at Ocasio-Cortez because she will be gone from history’s stage in the blink of an eye.

Dave Ball is vice chairman of the Washington County Republican Party and a Peters Township councilman.