Ocasio-Cortez Suggests Tesla Should Be Nationalized Following Subsidies
New York City’s incoming socialist congresswoman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is suggesting the federal government should nationalize technology the automaker Tesla developed following its receipt of tax subsidies.
It’s past time, she said, that the government gets its “due” for this “investment.”
“I think that there's so much work that has been done and there are some outlying questions, especially when it comes to investment in technologies, when we as a public choose to invest in private — when we as a public choose to invest in new technologies, we deserve a return on that investment,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “And for far too long we gave money to Tesla, we gave money to a ton of people, and we got no return on our investment that the public made in creating technologies. And it's about time that we get our due, because it's the public that funded and financed a lot of innovative technologies and that's another, you know, way to go."
The comments came during a Bernie Sanders hosted symposium on global warming.
Ocasio-Cortez has likened her envisioned global warming programs to another New Deal, or as she calls it, a “Green New Deal.”
“I believe that the progressive movement is the only movement that has answers right now,” she said. “We're the only ones that are drawing from the lessons of history, from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, from some of the most ambitious projects that we have pursued in American history. And that truly again is the scale that it's going to take.”
Ocasio-Cortez also told the audience that passing these laws will “inevitably” create “economic, social, and racial justice.”
“It's not just possible that we will create jobs and economic activity by transitioning to renewable energy, but it's inevitable that we are going to create jobs,” she said. “It's inevitable that we're going to create industry, and it's inevitable that we can use the transition to a hundred percent renewable energy as the vehicle to truly deliver and establish economic, social and racial justice in the United States of America. That is our proposal and that is what we are here to do, because in the depths of darkness, in the depths of despair, which is what we last saw — you know, when we think about where we were when the New Deal was established, we were a nation in depression, in Great Depression, we were a nation on the brink of war.”
