Former AOC aide Justine Medina now working as New York Communist Party boss
https://nypost.com/2023/05/13/ex-aoc-aide-justine-medina-now-new-york-communist-party-boss
Former AOC aide Justine Medina now working as New York Communist Party boss
By Jon Levine
May 13, 2023
A ex-aide to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is now working as a senior official in the New York State Communist Party.
Justine Medina, 33, spent a year employed by “The Squad” leader as a political organizer in 2020 and was paid more than $35,000 between February and November of that year, Federal Election Commission records show.
Almost immediately after the election, Medina began working as a full-blown Marxist. In July 2021, she was identified as “co-chair of the New York Young Communist League” by the Communist Party newspaper People’s World. The same publication today identifies her as a member of the “Executive Committee of the New York State Communist Party.”
Social media records show Medina’s Marxist proclivities were in full bloom before and during her employment with Rep. Ocasio-Cortez.
“Well, I am a Communist, but work for AOC,” she said proudly in a tweet from October 2020. “Communism is about equality, democracy, peace, the advancement of workers, the oppressed, and humanity in general,” she added a month later.
“It is true the path there will be unkind to those who block progress, but Communism is good and should not scare you,” she noted darkly in the same posting.
In AOC’s campaign, Medina was responsible for “organizing & writing policy language with Anti-War Veterans & the Peace Movement,” she noted in March.
AOC follows Medina on Twitter and the two have posed for a smiling photo in the past.
Medina was involved in successful efforts to unionize Amazon’s workforce, efforts she bragged about in an article for the Communist Party website, which identified her as a packer at the Amazon warehouse in Staten Island. AOC has long been an Amazon antagonist. She played an integral role in killing a plan by the company to open a headquarters in New York City and has been a vocal supporter of Amazon unionization efforts — though some on the frontline note she has often failed to show up.
Like any good organizer, Medina also has a long history of arrests. She was booked at least twice in June 2020 during Black Lives Matter riots which convulsed the city. In a tweet, she complained cops’ zip ties were too tight. She was also busted that year for attempting to deface a plaque honoring Fred Trump in Woodhaven, Queens, according to the New Yorker.
Like many socialists, Medina is a child of privilege.
She is the daughter of Cuban-American lawyer Omar Medina, a wealthy trial attorney out of Tampa with a checkered past. Omar Medina’s license was suspended for 30 days in 2013 after he made false statements on behalf of a client, the Tampa Bay Business Journal reported. That same year he was sued for wage theft — the case was settled. He lives in a five bedroom, six-bathroom, 5,316-square foot manse in Tampa worth more than $3 million. He has donated thousands of dollars to President Biden and Hillary Clinton, records show.
“As for her allegiance to the Communist Party, I could not be further removed from that. It’s a big problem,” Omar Medina told The Post. “My family escaped communism, and my daughter is misguided as to the benefits that political system provides, it flat out doesn’t work.”
Justine Medina dismissed her father as a “rich anti-Castro … liberal,” who “just buy things.”
“It’s frightening. They’re coming out of the woodwork,” said Queens Councilman Bob Holden, a Democrat. “Communism has failed in so many places that it is mind-boggling that AOC’s constituents keep electing her. This is kind of like a smoking gun that these elected officials and congresspeople are out and out communist.”
Economically illiterate New York Times writer Michelle Goldberg, who supports the Green New Deal, said she didn’t notice when thieves charged more than $11,000 to her credit card
Michelle Goldberg is an opinion writer for the New York Times. She is in favor of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal. In a recent column, Goldberg wrote:
“Warren, of course, will also be good on climate, and she has endorsed the idea of a Green New Deal put forward by Democrats like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.”
In the same column, Goldberg displayed her own economic illiteracy when she explained that she never looks over her monthly credit card statement, and that it was only when her husband looked at it that she found out that a corrupt and fraudulent bank had been charging her hundreds of dollars per month, for years, for a total of more than $11,000. She wrote:
“A few years ago, when I was self-employed and had recently had my second child, my husband went combing through my credit card statements, looking for tax deductions that I’d missed. I’m financially disorganized at the best of times, and with a baby and a toddler, I was barely even trying to keep track of my business expenses. So it’s not surprising that I hadn’t noticed the hundreds of dollars of weird recurring bank charges that my husband discovered.”
“It turned out I’d been signed up for a dubious program that purported to protect users’ credit in certain emergency situations. My bank had been accused of fraudulent practices in connection with it and fined $700 million by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the government agency that was Senator Elizabeth Warren’s brainchild. I tried, maddeningly, to seek redress from the bank — cycling through phone trees, screaming at automated operators. No one could tell me how I’d been enrolled in the program, or for how long.”
“Eventually, I turned to the C.F.P.B. itself, filling out a simple form on its website. A few weeks later, I was notified that the bank had been deducting money from my account for years, and I was being refunded more than $11,000. Having financed my own maternity leave, I badly needed the money.”
The fact that Goldberg never looked over her monthly credit card statements, and that she hadn’t noticed this theft and fraud, proves that she is economically illiterate.
And it’s that same economic illiteracy that causes Goldberg to support the Green New Deal.
Even the supporters of the Green New Deal admit that they don’t know where the money to pay for it is going to come from.
In September 2018, CNN published this transcript of a conversation between Ocasio-Cortez and CNN correspondent Jake Tapper, where Ocasio-Cortez repeatedly refused to answer Tapper’s questions about where the funding for the Green New Deal would come from. Here are their exact words:
TAPPER: Your platform has called for various new programs, including Medicare for all, housing as a federal right, a federal jobs guarantee, tuition-free public college, canceling all student loan debt.
According to nonpartisan and left-leaning studies friendly to your cause, including the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities or the Tax Policy Center, the overall price tag is more than $40 trillion in the next decade.
You recently said in an interview that increasing taxes on the very wealthy, plus an increased corporate tax rate, would make $2 trillion over the next 10 years.
So, where is the other $38 trillion going to come from?
OCASIO-CORTEZ: Well, one of the things that we need to realize when we look at something like Medicare for all, Medicare for all would save the American people a very large amount of money.
And what we see as well is that these systems are not just pie in the sky. They are — many of them are accomplished by every modern, civilized democracy in the Western world. The United — the United Kingdom has a form of single-payer health care, Canada, France, Germany.
What we need to realize is that these investments are better and they are good for our future. These are generational investments, so that not just — they’re not short-term Band-Aids, but they are really profound decisions about who we want to be as a nation and as — and how we want to act, as the wealthiest nation in the history of the world.
TAPPER: Right. Now, I get that, but the price tag for everything that you have laid out in your campaign is $40 trillion over the next 10 years.
I understand that Medicare for all would cost more to some wealthier people and to the government and to taxpayers, while also reducing individual health care expenditures.
But I’m talking about the overall package. You say it’s not pie in the sky, but $40 trillion is quite a bit of money. And the taxes that you talked about raising to pay for this, to pay for your agenda, only count for two.
And I — we’re going by left-leaning analysts.
OCASIO-CORTEZ: Right.
Well, when you look again at, again, how our health care works, currently, we pay — much of these costs go into the private sector. So what we see is, for example, a year ago, I was working downtown in a restaurant.
I went around and I asked, how many of you folks have health insurance? Not a single person did, because these — they were paying — they would have had to pay $200 a month for — for a payment for insurance that had an $8,000 deductible.
TAPPER: Yes.
OCASIO-CORTEZ: What these represent are lower costs overall for these programs.
And, additionally, what this is, is a broader agenda. We do know and we acknowledge that there are political realities. They don’t always happen with just the wave of a wand. But we can work to make these things happen.
And, in fact, when we — when you look at the economic activity that it spurs, for example, if you look at my generation, millennials, the amount of economic activity that we do not engage, the fact that we delay purchasing homes, that we don’t participate in the economy and purchasing cars, et cetera, as fully as possible, is a cost.
It is an externality, if you will, of unprecedented — unprecedented amount of student loan debt.
TAPPER: So, I’m assuming I’m not going to get an answer for the other $38 trillion.
So that’s the relevant part of the conversation between Ocasio-Cortez and CNN correspondent Jake Tapper.
You can see their conversation here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CWUgPWRhxU
Supporters of the $40 trillion Green New Deal have already said where $2 trillion of its price will come from. But when Tapper repeatedly asked Ocasio-Cortez where the other $38 trillion was gong to come from, she repeatedly refused to answer him.
Perhaps Ocasio-Cortez could charge that $38 trillion to Michelle Goldberg’s credit card.
Poll: What do you think of Denmark’s long term welfare policy for able bodied people?
This New York Times article is from six years ago, but I just found out about it.
The article talks about able-bodied people in Denmark who have been on welfare for a very long time.
It says these able bodied adults get more money from welfare than what many full time workers get from their jobs.
Here’s one example from the article:
It began as a stunt intended to prove that hardship and poverty still existed in this small, wealthy country, but it backfired badly. Visit a single mother of two on welfare, a liberal member of Parliament goaded a skeptical political opponent, see for yourself how hard it is.
It turned out, however, that life on welfare was not so hard. The 36-year-old single mother, given the pseudonym “Carina” in the news media, had more money to spend than many of the country’s full-time workers. All told, she was getting about $2,700 a month, and she had been on welfare since she was 16.
Here’s another example from the article:
Robert Nielsen, 45, made headlines last September when he was interviewed on television, admitting that he had basically been on welfare since 2001.
Mr. Nielsen said he was able-bodied but had no intention of taking a demeaning job, like working at a fast-food restaurant. He made do quite well on welfare, he said…
… Mr. Nielsen, called “Lazy Robert” by the news media, seems to be enjoying the attention. He says that he is greeted warmly on the street all the time. “Luckily, I am born and live in Denmark, where the government is willing to support my life,” he said.
So when you hear Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, and other American politicians say they want the U.S. to be like Denmark, please ask yourself if the two people cited above by the New York Times are how you would want your own able bodied children to behave when they grow up.
Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog 