Some out-of-touch advice for out-of-work Americans

Analysis by FPI / April 24, 2020

Two of the Democratic Party's biggest stars have advice for Americans who are desperate to get back to work so they can provide for their families.

Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said workers should boycott America's re-opening. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said the unemployed should stop whining and get an "essential" job.

When American businesses re-open from coronavirus lockdown, their workers should refuse to go back to work, Ocasio-Cortez said.

“When we talk about this idea of ‘re-opening society’ you know, only in America does the President, when the President tweets about liberation, does he mean go back to work. When we have this discussion about going back or re-opening, I think a lot people should just say 'no, we’re not going back to that. We’re not going back to working 70 hour weeks just so that we can put food on the table and not even feel any sort of semblance of security in our lives,' ” the New York Democrat said in an interview on Seat at the Table with Anand Giridharadas on Vice.

During his April 22 press conference, Cuomo was asked if there was a right to work for unemployed New Yorkers who were not getting their unemployment checks and needed money.

“You want to go to work, go take a job as an essential worker,” Cuomo said. “Do it tomorrow.”

Essential workers in New York include jobs in medical care, public infrastructure, public transportation, food supply, auto repair, and the media.

“There are people hiring. You can get a job as an essential worker, so now you can go to work and now you are an essential worker and now you won’t kill anyone,” Cuomo said.

The reporter said some of the protesters she spoke to were suffering the loss of their incomes for their families.

“These are regular people that aren’t getting a paycheck, some of them not getting their unemployment check,” the reporter said.

Cuomo asserted their unemployment was not worse than spreading the coronavirus, which, he argued, meant death. (Several recent scientific studies have shown the death rate from coronavirus to be much lower than initially reported by the corporate media and World Health Organization.)

“The illness is death, what is worth than death?” he asked, adding, “Economic hardship, yes, very bad, not death.”

Cuomo argued New Yorkers had a responsibility to each other not to spread the virus.

“It’s not about me, it’s about we,” he said. “Think about it as if it was your family that was getting infected.”

AOC, meanwhile, has made several contentious statements throughout the pandemic.

On April 20, she posted an apparently celebratory tweet in response to oil prices collapsing.

“You absolutely love to see it,” she said in the since-deleted tweet. She later tweeted: “This snapshot is being acknowledged as a turning point in the climate movement. Fossil fuels are in long-term structural decline. This along w/ low interest rates means it‘s the right time to create millions of jobs transitioning to renewable and clean energy. A key opportunity.”

Last week, Ocasio-Cortez said she noticed a shift in the coronavirus narrative when the impact on the black community became clear. Ocasio-Cortez, who went on ABC’s “The View,” made claims that warnings about smoking and drinking came only after the highest risk group changed from elderly people to minority communities.

Ocasio-Cortez went on to say that the real “pre-existing condition” with regard to the coronavirus pandemic is inequality from decades of systemic racism and policies that disproportionately impact minority communities.

“It’s the inequality that’s the pre-existing condition, and you can’t just go to someone and tell them, hey. You should have had health care this whole time when you’re working, you know, when you’re working an hourly job and your employer doesn’t give it to you,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “You know, a lot of these pre-existing conditions have to do with the inability to access quality health care, the inability to afford quality health care because we live in a country that continues to have a for-profit health care system unlike the rest of the developed world.”

Free Press International