ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ : 'CAPITALISM IS IRREDEEMABLE'

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez says that its about system change not climate change.

IN A WIDE RANGING discussion with moderator Briahna Gray, senior politics editor at news website The Intercept, socialist congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez described capitalism as 'irredeemable'.

""Capitalism is an ideology of capital. The most important thing is the concentration of capital and to seek and maximize profit. ... so to me capitalism is irredeemable."

She advised her audience to "“Stop trying to navigate systems that weren’t built for you. We need to build new systems.”

AOC was speaking at the South by South West music, film, and media festival held in Austin, Texas last week. The house was packed for AOC with a long line of people queuing outside, unable to get in.

She was also critical of centrist and liberal politicians and they're resistance to real change, commenting that 'baby steps' - or incremental reforms - were not enough to effectively tackle the problems both the United States and the world faced. She bemoaned the 'slow erosion' of American moderates who fought against real change with cynicism.

 “We’ve become so cynical, that we view ‘meh,’ or ‘eh’—we view cynicism as an intellectually superior attitude,” she said. “And we view ambition as youthful naiveté when… the greatest things we have ever accomplished as a society have been ambitious acts of visions. The ‘meh’ is worshipped now. For what? Like, for what? Moderate is not a stance. It's just an attitude towards life of, like, 'meh."

AOC has been instrumental in pushing a 'Green New Deal', a plan that recognises that climate change cannot be tackled without fundamental changes to the United States economy. It calls for large scale government intervention, rejecting the notion that the fight against climate change can be largely left to 'the market' - the neoliberal strategy being pursued by the Labour-led government and its coalition supporter, the Green's.