According to the Daily Beast, sometime Democratic superstar Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was in talks with a high-profile Hollywood agent about writing a book, but the deal appears to have fallen though. Part of the problem may have been the fact that the agency she chose to consult, CAA, is a talent agency, not a literary agency.
But not to fear. Ocasio-Cortez may not be writing a book any time soon, but she has lent her dulcet voice to the narration of a seven-minute animated video written by social activist and Green New Deal enthusiast Naomi Klein, whose other projects includes the book “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. Climate.”
According to an introduction written by Klein at The Intercept, where she is a senior correspondent, “A Message From the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez” is set “a couple of decades from now.” Apparently it takes place in an alternative reality where “like, the world” didn’t “end in 12 years,” to paraphrase Ocasio-Cortez’s dire prediction in January.
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Indeed the video is “a flat-out rejection of the idea that a dystopian future is a forgone conclusion. Instead, it offers a thought experiment: What if we decided not to drive off the climate cliff? What if we chose to radically change course and save both our habitat and ourselves?”
Apparently somehow Ocasio-Cortez (or perhaps more accurately Klein) figured out a way of paying for this extravaganza, which by conservative estimates would carry a price tag of $39 trillion.
But financing the Green New Deal isn’t the biggest stumbling block to its realization. It’s skepticism. As Klein finger wags in her intro, the problem is that we haven’t been conditioned as a society to think big or outside the box:
We have grown up bombarded with the message that there is no alternative to the crappy system that is destabilizing the planet and hoarding vast wealth at the top. From most economists, we hear that we are fundamentally selfish, gratification-seeking units. From historians, we learn that social change has always been the work of singular great men.
But, she writes, there is “good news: The old New Deal faced almost precisely the same kinds of opposition — and it didn’t stop it for a minute.”
