Sitting before a packed University of Chicago audience Friday evening in a chapel named after oil baron John D. Rockefeller, New York U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defended a recent podcast interview in which she said, “You can’t earn a billion dollars.”
The on-brand remark from one of the standard-bearers of the Democratic Party’s left flank drew the ire of The Washington Post editorial board and prompted the opening question from political strategist David Axelrod during an hour-plus discussion hosted by the U. of C.’s Institute of Politics.
The comments were meant to draw attention to the extreme consolidation of wealth and “abuses of market power” that characterize the economic and political systems in the U.S. today, Ocasio-Cortez said. She attributed the editorial board’s criticisms to the influence of the paper’s multibillionaire owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
“To working people, ‘earn’ means something: the calluses on your hands, the aches of your joints, the way that we earn ourselves through school,” Ocasio-Cortez said, adding: “I think that we are in an ’emperor with no clothes’ moment when it comes to the American economy and our democracy.”
Ocasio-Cortez, widely regarded as a potential candidate in 2028 for the Democratic presidential nomination, steered clear of addressing whether her critiques applied to another possible White House contender, Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker, whose fortune, Forbes estimates, now stands at $4.3 billion.
When Axelrod read an excerpt from the Post editorial that raised the rhetorical question of whether “the FBI should investigate Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker,” the four-term congresswoman said her critique is not focused on individuals but rather “the system that allows this mass concentration of wealth.”
“They want us to get into this quibbling of the morality of any individual person instead of the immorality of the fact that there (is) virtually no place in America where you can afford an apartment on a full-time job on minimum wage,” she said.
The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of megabillionaires and their industries has created an environment ripe for abuse, Ocasio-Cortez said, pointing to the cozy relationship between President Donald Trump’s administration and the tech industry as an example.
“We have the embodiment of political corruption happening in this administration,” she said.
Her prescriptions were a forceful recitation of the left’s economic agenda: get big money out of politics and kill super political action committees; break up corporate monopolies through aggressive antitrust enforcement; tax the wealthy at rates not seen since earlier eras of U.S. history; and overhaul the judiciary by codifying ethics rules or expanding the Supreme Court.
The wide-ranging conversation with Axelrod also touched on other top issues of the day, including the recent Supreme Court decision limiting racial considerations in congressional redistricting, Friday’s decision by Virginia’s high court to throw out new voter-approved district lines that favored Democrats, and the rising influence and power of the artificial intelligence industry.
When Axelrod raised the prospect of Ocasio-Cortez running for president or for the New York Senate seat currently held by Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in 2028, the latter drew a slightly more enthusiastic response from the U. of C. audience.
Like Pritzker and others whose names frequently come up in discussions of the 2028 Democratic field, Ocasio-Cortez, who last year traveled the country with Vermont U.S. Sen. Bernie on the “Fight Oligarchy” tour, was noncommittal about her future political plans.
Ocasio-Cortez said her “ambition is way bigger” than any particular seat or title.
“My ambition is to change this country,” she said. “Presidents come and go, Senate, House seats, elected officials come and go, but single-payer healthcare’s forever, a living wage is forever, workers’ rights are forever, women’s rights, all of that.”
Ocasio-Cortez was not the only possible 2028 Democratic presidential candidate in Chicago on Friday. Earlier in the day, former U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg addressed a convention of civic technology workers at a hotel in the South Loop.
