Thank God for AOC!

Thank God for Democrats and AOC protecting America from corporations who seek to exploit for profit public lands.

This is a woman who is doing her job.

Think of the important points she raises, and what Repubs would do if they controlled the Presidency, the House, and the Senate.

I knew, all along, that when AOC matured in her job, she would be someone to reckon with, and this is proof of that contention:

AOC rebuts Republicans on the following issues:

1. Child Labor and Mineral Production:
2. Chinese Ownership of Minerals:
3. Responsible Mining and Battery Recycling:
4. Environmental Impact of GOP Bills:
5. Balancing Conservation and Energy Production:
6. Concerns about Foreign Ownership and Deregulation:
7. Prioritizing Public Interest over Corporate Interests:

Feel free to discuss/debate, etc. Those who violate my sig will be ignored.

(mods: the clip has no TYT org content, content is provided by the House to C-SPAN, and content is House of Rep activity, thus 'public domain')




Transcript:

Rep Chip Roy:
Representative Ocasio-Cortez, what do you say to that point?
Right. When we've got significant amount of evidence that,
China owns the vast majority, if not all, 80% plus of the, cobalt mine production coming out of Congo, etc.. And we know, I think it's irrefutable that there's child labor exploited
to get those minerals. Those minerals are central, if not fully necessary, for the production of EVs, which even objectively, we have to acknowledge are not fully able to power
the ability of the American public to get to their jobs and their work and so forth.
And yet we're mandating that we have two thirds of the production be EVs by 2030,
assume we were able to ever produce batteries that last long enough
to charging stations, all the stuff. Why would we get rid of the American production of it?

Rep AOC:
Thank you.
There are several different components to your question.
I want to make sure that I address them first and foremost on the issue of child
exploitation, child labor, I think it is the role of the United States
for us to push back forcefully on, on this production and not just in the production
of energy, but across the board.We see this in textile production, energy production, cobalt mining. It is horrific, and we need to make sure that our sources do not,
do not include child labor, but to get to your the core of the question two
on the China front is that I find it interesting that there is this concern
about Chinese ownership of minerals. And it is it is legitimate.
However, the response to that seems to be deregulation specifically
for companies that are largely Chinese owned here in the United States.
These companies are subsidiaries where the benefit of what we are deregulating here.
And I'll give you a specific example, I --you know, I would be remiss not to mention
that the minerals produced specifically at the proposed Twin Metals mine
that is implicated in this legislation would most likely be shipped to China
for refining and smelting to be sold on the global market.
These are not American owned companies that this that American mined
minerals would be going to. And so if your concern is the Chinese predominance of ownership in the mining in the mining market, I would be very concerned about passing this legislation so that I think on the China piece there.
And lastly, on the meeting our targets and mining cobalt, I think it's
a false choice to say that in order for us to mine cobalt, we either have to destroy
some of the most sacred lands in the United States or rely on child labor.
There's responsible mining in the United States that is available to us.
But secondly, it also---I also find it interesting that the majority presently
pushes back against battery recycling, which would allow us to open the path
to reducing our reliance on mining in general. There is enormous potential in recycling many of these EV batteries, but we have not made the investments or the shifts necessary in order to unlock that, so that we can reduce our reliance on on solely mining as the only source of battery.

Rep Michael Burgess (committee chairman):
For far too long, the Biden administration has used people when unelected federal officials to enact their radical agenda. Our constituents and American industry have paid the price. House Republicans are committed to ending the weaponization
of the bureaucratic state, and that's why we're taking up several bills
to roll back executive branch overreach. H.R. 764, the Trust of Science Act, de-list the gray wolf as an endangered species, marking a successful story of conservation and stewardship. H.R. 6285, Alaska's Right to to Produce Act H.R. 3195, the Superior National Forest Restoration Act, and H.R. 2925, the Mining Regulatory Clarity Act will remove roadblocks set up by radical officials to hinder American energy production.
Finally, H.R. 615, the Protecting Access for Hunters and Anglers Act,
will prevent the Biden administration from barring the use of certain ammunition
or tackle on public lands.


Rep AOC
You know, Earth Day was just last week, but the celebration is clearly over with Fossil Fuel Week that seems to be presented with many of these bills. It's astounding how House Republicans continue to push an agenda that people are simply not asking for. They voted to cut veterans benefits, raise costs, and, like we're seeing today, enrich the wealthiest corporations, especially the fossil fuel industry.
To the ranking members point, one good thing that we can say about these
bills is that they have no choice. They have no chance of becoming law. They are going nowhere in the Senate. And nevertheless, though we have six bills before us, so let's get into them.

H.R. 6285 would fast track drilling for oil and gas in the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Bering Sea. We're going to hear about how we need to destroy these places to help with energy prices, but that is simply not true. The United States is already the number one producer of oil and the number one producer and exporter of gas. All that has all that has done is increase carbon emissions and enrich an industry that is already seeing record profits. Meanwhile, consumers still face volatile prices. That's for two reasons. The first is price gouging by the oil and gas industry, and the second is that oil and gas are global commodities. No amount of endless drilling can shield us from price shocks when OPEC decides to raise prices, or when Russia decides to start a war in Europe.

If we want energy independence, we should be transitioning to solar, wind,
geothermal and other clean energy sources that aren't subject to those kinds
of shocks and that creates that create good union jobs right here at home.
Oil and gas already enjoy an obscene wealth of tax giveaways in this country,
special loopholes and other subsidies as well. But we're supposed to believe that if we continue to let them drill just a little more, that they will finally lower their prices.


It--This is all trickle down nonsense. This bill is is a giveaway to some of the wealthiest and most damaging polluters in the United States. And then we have the mining bills. Our existing mining law is outdated and bad enough as it is. The one frail guardrail guardrail that we currently have is that currently a mining claim is only valid if it contains valuable minerals. Makes sense. There has to actually be something there to mine.
H.R. 2925 gets rid of that requirement, making it so that anyone can get exclusive
rights to our public lands for about $10 per acre per year, permanently locking up
almost any public land without there even being a valuable mineral deposit.
Then the claimant can conduct whatever, quote, mining related activities
they want, including burying the land in toxic mining waste.

Plus, the bill rolls out the welcome mat for quote unquote nuisance claims by bad
actors who want to lock land up from being used for conservation or renewable energy
unless someone buys them out. Meanwhile, H.R. 3195 would allow toxic sulfide or copper mining in the Superior National Forest just outside the pristine Boundary Waters
Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota. The Forest Service already looked into this and concluded that the mine could result in, and I quote, extreme, serious and irreparable harm to the watershed of this wilderness area. These bills are total giveaways to wealthy corporate polluters. It's climate denialism, pure and simple.

That theme continues with H.R. 3397, which would repeal the Bureau
of Land Management's Public Lands Rule. The bureau has a multiple use mandate that requires striking a balance between all potential uses. Of the 245 million surface acres of the people's lands that it manages, including commercial, recreational, and conservation activities. The new regulation finally ensures that conservation is on equal footing
with uses like oil and gas development, timber, livestock grazing and mining.
The rule also standardizes and provides guidance for related tools like conservation leases. It does not prevent responsible energy development, including renewable energy projects and building transmission lines. But this bill would repeal the rule because putting conservation on equal footing with fossil fuels is apparently too much to ask.

Next is H.R. 764, the Orwellian named Trust the Science Act. According to this bill, the science says that Congress should silence conservation experts and mandate that the iconic gray wolf be delisted under the Endangered Species Act. Somehow, I think that's not what the science really says. The last time the wolf was delisted, we saw states set up harvest quotas and even cash bounties for killing these animals, even their pups. And finally, we have H.R. 615, which would ban the Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service, and the Fish and Wildlife Service from prohibiting or regulating lead, ammunition or tackle on federal lands or waters, even though alternatives do exist that do not poison everything in sight. Right now we have a climate crisis, student loans burdening our youth and our economy, health care costs to deal with. But this and this set of bills is what Republicans are currently doing in the waning days of their majority. They're putting forward an agenda brought to you by GOP guns, oil and polluter polluters. It's not too late to put up a better schedule for the House this week. I oppose these these bills and yield back.

Rep Mary Scanlon:
I am very concerned that these bills are a huge step back for our environment
and our endangered species. They seem to be predicated on a false kind of a binary choice. And I don't think it's true that President Biden or Democrats or the American people have any interest in having a blanket prohibition on development.
But we we do want a system that fairly takes into account public safety, conservation and the damage to our environment and our children's future if we aren't taking those into consideration. So can you comment on that?

Rep AOC;
- Absolutely Representative Scanlon, as you noted, particularly in the public land rule,
specifically the this shift in the rule is not even to put conservation and restoration above, you know, energy production, recreation or any other considerations.
It's simply to allow the consideration to be on equal footing. And I would I would emphatically push back on the notion that conservation is just simply cordoning off, that this rule is just about conservation and cordoning off several acres of land and saying, there's nothing to be done here.

But this is also about land restoration. And there are so many acres of land, federal lands, public lands. This is land that belongs to the people of the United States of America that has been dumped on, that has been allowed to be overridden with toxic waste, that people are getting sick from, that species are becoming endangered from.
And to allow that to simply be an equal consideration, as the federal government
and the Bureau of Land Management doles out and makes decisions oftentimes
affirmatively about energy production, I think is eminently reasonable.

Rep Mary Scanlon:
I think that makes a lot of sense that we're trying to balance some competing concerns, but that we really do need to take into account these conservation concerns. So I would yield back.

Rep Leger-Fernandez:
This is the problem is we keep hearing from the Republicans that they're about America first, right? We keep hearing that they're not, you know, that they want to take on China, but then they when they have a chance, they do not do it.
This bill does nothing to stop China or Russia or any other foreign corporations.
As much as I might like Canada, Canadian corporations are some of the
biggest corporations mining our resources and not giving the American people a dime.
And that's what bothers me about this. All kinds of things that bother me.
But representative Ocasio-Cortez, you wanted to respond to some of this?

Rep AOC:
I mean, Representative Leger-fernandez, you've encapsulated so much
of what is wrong with the general thrust of many of these bills. And to your point, this is not about what what many in the Republican majority are putting forward is not about America first. It's about America to the highest bidder, and it's about America
to whoever is willing to to pay the most. And the idea that federal public lands that belong to the American people of the United States could potentially be given away to any foreign company. And then when you importantly put that together with another one of
the of the bills that are proposed today, which is the complete deregulation
of mining in the United States, where they don't even have to prove that there is
a valid claim to a mineral in a space. This can very seriously be used for dangerous purposes that I think are counter to US national security, including our energy security.
We have to transition to renewable energy and an end to a in a built up grid in the
United States, which includes building out new energy transmission lines.
And imagine a scenario where a foreign owned company in the United States knows
that, that we domestically are trying to build out our energy grid
and build out an energy transmission line that requires going through federal land,
and they decide to stake that plot in order to avoid and prevent
the development of energy transmission lines in the United States.
It could slow down our grid. And it could it. There's so many different ways that this could go sideways.bIf we don't put a check to this right now, and we have to make sure that we're both engaging in conservation, engaging in restoration, but also engaging
in responsible use, in our responsibility to be proper stewards on behalf of
the American people, of our federal lands.

Rep Leger-Fernandez:
Yeah. I think that what we are looking at today really prioritizes the biggest,
wealthiest corporations yet again, mining corporations, whether they be
American or foreign over public interest. This is public land, American land, and Americans deserve to get paid when you take stuff out of it, because that's our minerals.
Those are our resources.

Rep AOC:
One last note, representative on, on the idea that the Boundary Waters and the deregulation around that is, is not of concern.There is currently mining in that area of taconite, but we're talking about expansion of this mining into elements like copper sulfide, which are far more toxic. And the fact that they are underground, near waters, Boundary Waters is actually quite alarming, if not more alarming than than otherwise. So I yield back.

 

Well done.

 

I agree with you, AOC has matured as a representative. She is a force to be reckoned with. More power to her.

 

I have been wrong about AOC and thought she was a total idiot and no one could possibly respect her. I was wrong. Someone does respect her.

 

From when she first started here job the only place she could go was up, that's how bad she was.

She went from complaining about the high cost of living in DC which caused her to say that's why congress engages in insider trading so they can afford to live there and that got her scolded by Pelosi. From there she matured to complaining about a monster in her garbage disposal. She gained even more maturity when she killed tons of good paying Amazon jobs in NYC. And finally she showed us how mature she is when she didn't know what a RICO crime was.

What, if anything, has AOC done for her district?

 

Hell, what has she done for her grandmother? Lol

 

She has a great rack

 

She has been a powerhouse in Congress. She has a promising future ahead of her and she could do great things for this country.

 

With any kind of luck at all, I won't live that long.

 

Yes thank God for her..... We really need someone to show the power of stupidity of people voting in groups.

 

I sincerely hope you live long enough to enjoy the benefits of her achievements.

 

If you do a search for dumb things AOC said, you'll find that a lot of the links are dead. Even links to her own Twitter account. I wonder how that happened?

Did Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Say We Need to 'Invent Technology That's Never Been Invented'?
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ocasio-cortez-technology-quote/

She doesn't want any racial preferences.

'Unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs.' AOC

 

That’s more that can be said for maga clowns like mtg, noem or boebert.

 

Well in the above example we can tell she has mastered the art of meaningless word salad. She manage to run on for multiple paragraghs without ever bothering to answer Chip Roy's question. Or explain exactly how we can build batteries sufficient to produce and store electric power from wind and solar alone without Chinese owned cobalt or mine our own battery material without strip mining.

 

And AOC makes anyone of the bunch look like rocket scientists.

 

AOC wants to tax the rich. Haven't the democrats worn that phrase out by now?

 

Consider your "sig" violated. Thank you for ignoring.

 

You engage often enough. You're not like zorro, and others.

 

Thank goodness for AOC... now blond jokes are a thing of the past..

 

Shucks you promised to ignore.

 

"We're the party of small government, balanced budgets'.

yeah, not only have you guys worn that one out, you pay lip service to it.

 

That was a young newbie congresswoman.

Here is the president:

"...I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in one minute and is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning..." Donald Trump

If I were inclined to sound the stupid alarm, it would be on the latter.

 

Every

Friggin

Thread

………………………

Its all about a three letter word...JOBS! J...O...B...S.

Poor kids are just as smart as white kids

We have plans to build a railroad from the Pacific all the way across the Indian Ocean

If you don’t vote for me , you ain’t black

Don’t

Pause

 

Cortez is one of the biggest morons to ever be elected to Congress.

The only thing to be reckoned with, is her level of stupidity.

 

She wants to pay people not to work. That's dumb AF.