Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez must be reading Media Matters’ playbook.
The freshman progressive has a plan to implement gun control and a climate change agenda without Congress’s approval. It involves pressuring major banks with a “shame campaign,” according to a new report.
Ocasio-Cortez admitted as much that “not everything has to be done through legislation explicitly.”
Shame campaign
Ocasio-Cortez has attracted scrutiny for her ambitious, expensive proposals to fix society’s woes, as well as her insensitivity towards facts and evidence, famously declaring that it’s more important to be morally right rather than factually correct. Now, the freshman congresswoman is eyeing a new strategy to implement a radical agenda that evokes the no-holds-barred strategy of progressive groups like Media Matters, which recently instigated advertiser boycotts against Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Politico reported Saturday that Ocasio-Cortez is “joining with veteran lawmakers to try to shame the lenders into taking a stand on some of the country’s most divisive issues: climate change, gun violence and immigration.” The young progressive, along with other House Democrats, are seeking to “[leverage] seats on the powerful House Financial Services Committee and a huge following on social media to confront finance industry executives and discourage them from funding oil pipelines, firearms makers and private prison companies that operate immigration detention centers.”
AOC is turning up the heat on major banks like Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase, directing her Twitter army of almost 4 million followers to target major financial institutions that fund private prisons, oil pipelines, and arms manufacturers. Ocasio-Cortez shared her flippant attitude towards achieving a policy agenda through traditional legislative means with Politico.
“There’s more than one way to skin a cat, and not everything has to be done through legislation explicitly,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “We can also use the tools that we have here to pressure change in other ways as well.”
The approach worked earlier this month, when both banks announced that they were cutting ties with private prison companies. Ocasio-Cortez declared victory on Twitter.
“Huge update: JP Morgan & Wells Fargo have announced that they will no longer fund private prisons,” she wrote on March 21. “How did this happen? Through organizing people & public pressure!”
Colluding with corporations
To critics of Ocasio-Cortez, this attitude sounds strikingly familiar: president Trump was recently rebuffed by Democrats and some Republicans over his national emergency declaration to build the wall, which critics described as an unconstitutional usurpation of Congress’s authority.
Ocasio-Cortez showed a hint of this new approach, in which banks are held accountable for distant actions taken by companies that they fund, when questioning Wells Fargo CEO Timothy Sloan in a House Financial Services Committee hearing that went viral this month. Ocasio-Cortez accused Wells Fargo of exacerbating climate change by funding the Dakota Access oil pipeline, and being complic in the “caging of children” for once funding private prison companies that built detention space for illegal immigrants. Other Democrats grilled Wells Fargo for not following the lead of other banks that have distanced themselves from gun manufacturers.
While it might sound ridiculous to blame banks for the actions of the parties with whom they do business, the strategy has already shown success.
“Banks are acutely sensitive about their reputations because they are in a business acutely susceptible to severe and sudden customer attrition if consumers vote with their wallets,” Federal Financial Analytics managing partner Karen Shaw Petrou said. “As a highly regulated business, banks are also acutely aware of how changing reputations alter their political-risk profile and what Congress can do to them when and if desired.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s strategy reflects a new interest among Democrats and progressive groups in bullying corporations to toe the line of the radical left agenda, and even the largest entities, fearing bad press, have increasingly integrated socially progressive viewpoints into corporate advertising and policy.
“We’re kind of stuck in this pattern overall where we wait for a disaster, for something horrific to happen, and then after people have died, or after people’s human rights have been abused, we say, ‘Oh, we have to hold people accountable’,” AOC said. “We can prevent these things from happening and I think that we should.”
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