Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez' Pitiable Betrayal 1

It's all too easy to look at the new young generation of ardent socialists and ridicule them as entitled "special snowflakes" who are utterly unprepared for the Real World.  Some lucky few manage to achieve wealth and power without ever having to come to grips with reality, which my be why their policy proposals reveal so little grasp of it.  These whiners don't appear to have any understanding of the price paid by their forbears, or even by other Americans, to bring about the comforts we enjoy today.

In part, though, we do them a disservice if we view millennials - yes, even millennial Democrat leaders - entirely with contempt.  By their overwhelming lust for power, our progressives have labored for generations to create an intellectual environment which betrays our most intelligent young people through a cynical fraud which robs them of their potential.

Let's examine one of their more prominent victims to explain how this fraud works.

The Younger AOC

According to the New York Post, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democrats' favorite progressive, owes $1,877.56 in unpaid corporate taxes.  The bill is from six years ago.

Brook Avenue Press, a company set up in the Bronx to publish books about city children, owes $1,877.56 in unpaid corporate taxes.

The state slapped the company with a warrant on July 6, 2017, two months after Ocasio-Cortez announced her candidacy to run against Democratic incumbent Joe Crowley for the district that encompasses parts of Queens and The Bronx.

AOC complained about taxes back when she was a business owner.

"You don't really make a profit in your first year," Ocasio-Cortez said in 2012. "To get taxed on top of that is a real whammy."

Lest you find it hard to believe that the same AOC who advocates confiscatory taxes on "the rich" once was a founding business person who expressed concern for excessive taxation, here's a 2012 video of her explaining her business.

Wait a sec - doesn't that sound like someone you'd want to vote for?

She Thought She'd Paid her Dues

Since the "AOC Goes to Washington" reality show hit the big time, its star comes across as someone who sincerely believes that she belongs among our ruling elites.  Her every statement implies that she's convinced that she's "the boss" whose words should be closely attended by superannuated, obsolete, unwoke politicians such as Nancy Pelosi.

It's so normal as to be stereotypical for young people to have an overinflated opinion of themselves, but verbally flipping the bird to the Speaker of the House is extreme even for teenagers.  Only to someone with an all-powerful ego would her level of arrogance even occur, much less to dare to behave that way.  What could have led her to think that?

Her parents, knowing that the Bronx schools were inferior and despairing of getting their daughter into the city's elite test-driven high schools, managed to move to the tony Westchester County town of Yorktown.  This is where she was known as 'Sandy Ocasio' at her elite, but nevertheless public, high school.  As conservative pundit Michael Knowles tweeted in response to her claims of having grown up poor in Bronx, "The average household wealth of the town in which you grew up is $1.2 million."

In other words, like just about every middle-class American today, her parents gave their daughter the very best education they could afford.  Although she didn't quite get into an "Ivy League School," she attended Boston University, which considers itself to be just a notch below the Ivies.  Indeed, BU is ranked #42, just below the lowest of the Ivies, by US News, whose ranking list has attracted the most prestige over the years.

Not only did AOC attend a college of high repute, she avoided an "XX-studies" non-major.  She graduated cum laude from BU's College of Arts and Sciences in 2011, majoring in international relations and economics - topics that are real, important, and in demand.

How did she start her career?  Not with government - and why should she?  Boston is home to universities which have spun off a great many money-making start-ups.  In 2015, the MIT News reported that MIT alumni-founded companies have created 4.6 million jobs, generating nearly $2 trillion in annual revenues from just one university.

Having been beguiled by story after story about how smart, well-educated, hardworking college graduates just like her start businesses and make fortunes, she decided to follow in their footsteps to wealth, and started a business too.

Guess what?  It failed!  Failing businesses are not news; the fact that 8 out of 10 start-ups funded by very smart, greedy venture capitalists fail - not to mention the hundreds more that don't get funded by VCs and also fail - never seems to make the front page.  AOC probably didn't know this, much like those who buy lottery tickets to the tune of the slogan "Everyone's winning, why not you?"

Boston universities want their students to become millionaires so they can hit them up for the alumni fund; never is there heard a discouraging word about start-ups.  The failure of her business, started by no less an exalted, worthy, educated being than herself, convinced her that the system was rigged against start-ups.

This could have been a path to enlightenment: our system really is rigged against startups, of course, most particularly so in the People's Republic of Massachusetts.  What's more, hordes of highly-paid lobbyists make sure that it stays rigged in favor of big firms, but that fact doesn't make her failure any less painful.  In truth, we sympathize: most of the writers of Scragged have also walked this road and ended up at the same apparently dead end.

The Second Act

What did she do?  As with many who get the "be your own boss and have a bunch of underlings to boss around" itch, she tried again.  But instead of raising venture money to start a new career in the private sector, she raised venture money to start a new career in the US House of Representatives: she attended an audition and was recruited by the Justice Democrats to run for office.

This was a totally ordinary, transparent process.  Political action committees routinely invest in candidates to run for office just as venture capitalists invest in candidates to start businesses.  The Justice Democrats explain their recruitment process on their website and in videos published to their public YouTube page; if you'd like to pursue an investment from them to fund your campaign, how to do it is right there for you.

Just as every investor dreams, in AOC the Justice Democrats happened upon a smashing success.  Not only did their annointed standard-bearer win office, she's continually expressing their point of view to a national audience.  Talk about founding Amazon, or Google!  Their speculative investment in AOC will pay off for years to come.

The Disappointment

Having made a success of her second venture, which is pretty good when you realize how many failures most of our successful entrepreneurs have before finally hitting the big time, she thought she'd be welcomed with open arms into the ranks of the ruling elite.  Alas, 'twas not to be.  The purpose of being a big-time politician is to be able to direct tax money to your friends in return for bribes which we call "campaign contributions" so as not to be accused of hate speech.

Democrats in the House and Senate appoint Democrats to positions high enough to allow serious theft on the basis of seniority.  As a newbie, AOC was on the bottom of the pile.  Nancy Pelosi, our very experienced speaker of the house, counseled the younger generation to "wait your turn," but AOC is convinced that "wait" is a 4-letter word.  She became an creative, entrepreneurial, supposedly truth-telling bomb-thrower, to the vast delight of the far left, the annoyance of the Democrat leadership, and the nervous giggles of conservatives.

The Betrayal

Why do we say that AOC was betrayed?  She was defrauded!  We tell children, "Go to school from the time you are 6 until you are 18. Put in your 12 years and we'll teach you to be a successful member of adult society."  About 50 years ago, we added "If you want big-time success, go to college."

The first statement was true up until the 1960's, when we began to "graduate" kids who couldn't make change from a dollar and, for a variety of reasons, sending our well-paying high-school-level manufacturing jobs to other countries.  The part about college was never wholly true even back then, and today isn't true at all.

Yet people still believe in the college fraud; indeed, they'll risk prison to give their kids a leg up on what they believe to be the road to riches.

So really, we ought to sympathize with the motives behind AOC's career switch, the angst under which she has been suffering, and even the desire for revenge that apparently motivates her.  There really is a problem and legitimate cause for resentment, which always results in a backlash when the resentment gets strong enough.  We'll explore this further in the next article in this series.