Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, superstar

Yes she's young, charismatic, boricua, bilingual, sharp as a scalpel and sassy as hell. But what's made her a superstar is not just that, but that she's got class. Working class.

"Una de las nuestras," one of ours, said a campaign button

Not her roots or her job, because it's not about her, it's about us. Occupy Wall Street was the first step, and perhaps the most important. "We are the 99%" showed that the working people are realizing that we are a "we," we have to defend our own interests against the very rich and their well-paid lackeys.

That realization has now led to an explicitly political movement  of working people determined to create our own political instrument, because both parties have been dominated by the interests of the 1%. Our working class political movement is what has made her a superstar.

Alexandria Ocasio may have contested a Democratic primary, but she refused to act like a mainstream Democratic candidate, begging for Corporate and Lobbyist money, or even hitting up her friends on Wall Street for that $2,700 maximum donation. But even if she had such friends it would not have done her any good once they saw her campaign based on a guaranteed job, a living wage of $15 an hour, Medicare for all and tuition-free access to higher education.

"Women like me aren't supposed to run for office. I wasn't born to a wealthy or powerful family: mother from Puerto Rico, father from the South Bronx." That's how her campaign video starts, and not because some consultant's idea played well with a focus group.

She wrote the script herself after two members of the Democratic Socialists of America in Detroit that started a video production company heard about her and offered their help. The streets are the ones she's walked, the people campaigning aren't actors shot on carefully prepared sets, they just shot her and her supporters as they really are.

It is that honesty and transparency that found fertile soil among regular people who have realized we need our own people in Congress, not "friends" who spend hours every day dialing for dollars.

Columnist Kruta terrified by right to healthcare & living wage

And that response is scaring the shit out of the right. Daily Caller columnist and Fox News contributor Virginia Kruta was aghast in a piece she wrote a couple of weeks ago about an Ocasio speech in support of another candidate.

"I saw something truly terrifying. I saw just how easy it would be ... to accept the idea that my children deserve healthcare and education," Kruta wrote.

Worse, "I saw how easy it would be, as someone who has struggled to make ends meet, to accept the idea that a 'living wage' was a human right." Fortunately, her faith in "our nation’s founding and its history" reminded her that in America, we still have the right to be ignorant, sick and impoverished.

Nevertheless, Kruta had her picture taken with the devil herself, "in part to remind myself of that time I crashed a rally headlined by a socialist, but also in part to remind myself that there, but for the grace of God, go I."

--José G. Pérez

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