Ocasio-Cortez: ‘There Will Be No Future in the Bronx’ If We Don’t Pass Green New Deal

HAYES: "Why this issue front and center first thing? What connects you to this?"

OCASIO-CORTEZ: "So this issue is not just about our climate. First and foremost we need to save ourselves, period. There will be no future for the Bronx. There will be no livable future for generations coming, for any part of this country in a way that is better than lot that we have today if we don’t address this issue urgently and on the scale of the problem. But how I access this issue is that I started looking at all of our problems. We have run away income and equality. We’re at one of our most unequal points economically speaking in American history. We are dealing with a crisis of how our economy is made up. Our economy is increasingly financialized. Which means we’re making profits off of interest and off of leasing your phones, off of doing all these things, but we’re not producing and we’re not innovating in the way we need to as an economy. And I also was looking at our issues of social justice,  social and racial justice which we are- which we have a nexus here in the Bronx. And I started thinking about to myself was listen, we’re looking at all of these issues, Medicare for all living wage, tuition-free public colleges and universities. And there’s this false idea we need put them in a line and say do this or do that. You care about health care or do you care about the economy or jobs? And then I started to realize that these are not different problems. These are all part of the same problem. In the past we’ve confronted this type of stagnation and this type of systemic threat as a country. First all of we’ve been here before. We’ve been here before with the Great Depression. We've been here before with World War II, even the Cold War. And the answer has been an ambitious and directed mobilization of the American economy to direct and solve our problem, our biggest problem. And historically speaking -- "