Issues. She also took questions from her constituents. This is about two hours. Hi everyone. [cheering] how is it going. [applause] good afternoon everybody. Hey malika. Lots of beautiful familiar faces, lots of people new faces. Welcome everybody. We are super excited, this is our monthly town hall and we are really excited and of course we are on track, we have not skipped a single month so weve kept on track for their promise at the beginning of the term, at least one town hall per month and this is nine out of nine town halls in addition to many, many local Community Events that we have been participating in. Very quickly before we start i want to acknowledge everyone here, our staff that has worked so hard putting this together. Id like to acknowledge them. Michelle, mabel, ariel, daniel, noreen. There we go. And marcus, sorry. Marcus is live streaming. Destiny, sorry and forgetting everything. And we have Translation Services this year today shes and we also have apollyon translation. If you need it, feel free to reach herer hand. And our staff can make sure that you get the translation servicee available. That being said, hello everyone. Hi, good evening. Are we at evening . Yes. Okay. Michelle is going to kick us off. What you can because often we will dive right into it. Hello good evening everyone. Thank you all for coming today for our Community Town hall, i am Michelle Hernandez and im with alexander ocasiocortez, we want to thank you all for coming to discuss an important topic which is antipoverty. In the congresswoman recently rolled out a legislative package called a just society. And its an ambitious and monumental antipoverty legislative package and we are excited to be talking about that today. Quick acknowledgments, we want to think mr. Gao with the Queens Public Library for sharing this space with us tonight. We want to thank sylvia martin, president of the city library, thank you so much for helping without me and i also want to thank gomez and malika for their promotional efforts, and i would like to recognize michelle who is a part of the tennis association. [applause] we are going to start with opening remarks from the congresswoman who is going to walk us through the legislative package in our chief of staff who is joining us from d. C. Area is going to talk about some of the bill and right before we get into that, i want to discuss and recognize everyones voice that has been here. In order to do that we are going to keep a little bit of time soi we can hear as many voices as possible in a pointtopoint my colleague mabel, everyone will have around two minutes to present their questions or comments and mabel will be keeping us on track. And then i also want to recognize one mike, one voice, we all went to listen to the person that is speaking. So create a respectful environment have this discussion in the last item, you have received a q a clip so if you have a clip and have any questions of my colleagues noreen and marcus will be going around collecting them, you can raise them and we will go around collecting them so at the end and you can be able to ask a question. Without further ado, it is my honor to introduce the representative of new york 14 alexandria ocasiocortez. Thank you so much. Hello again. So as michelle noted, one of the Major Updates that we have this month, we introduce our next major sweeping registration known as the just society. In one of the things that we really wanted tot talk about, e package of five bills and one resolution were talking about housing and who we allow to be eligible for our social safety net in america and were talkino about proworker policy that protects working conditions and promotes proworker policies like paid family leave, living wages and et cetera. It also compels us to join the Global Community and an elevated commitment to working people. Before i get into that very briefly, i went to address the news elephant in the room. One of the other things to happen, the house of representatives has decided to move forward with impeachment of the president of the United States. [applause] and this was a Major Development and some folks are saying finally, i certainly feel that way. I do not want to spend an enormous amount of time talking about impeachment but if you have questions i am happy to talk to you about it. Basically long story short, the president of the United States used the power of the United States government to attempt to extort a Foreign Government into creating or drumming up manufactured investigation into his opponents. This is a violation of the constitution of the United States and abuse of power and betrayal ofin our country and anyone who does Something Like that, i dont care a democrat or republican if you abuse power and betray our country in such a manner, you must be impeached in order for us to perfect our world of law in our country. Thank you. Pretty open and shut. And again, if you have questions, please reserve them for the and but i feel like its a pretty open and closed situation as many of you know ive advocated for impeachment for quite some time and this abuse of power has been going on for quite some time. I think for our community, there a lot of folks that are saying this is not a joyous moment or a moment to celebrate. But i think its important to acknowledge that this is a moment for many people in our community that have been the subject to the abuse of this ministration for quite some time especially for our committee about 50 immigrant and 70 of people over color and over working class which have to indoor over the last two years. I am not here to Police Reaction to it, we all need to go through a process. Feel what you need to feel. Ov that is what is going on. Again i want to move on, i think the whole thing is boring and he shouldve been impeached a long time ago. I am over t it. So that is how i feel about it. We have work to do. Because the impeachment of this president is the shortterm action that we need to take to preserve our democracy. But if were really going to thrive as a country, we need to make longterm investments and keep her eyes on the price of social economic and Racial Justice in the United States of america. That is really what this is about. So lets dive in. Very quickly, do i have the clicker, dry use the clicker . What we are going to do, what a just society is, it is about five bills in one resolution that is really focused on antipoverty legislation and focusing on establishing economic and racial gusts under justice. I will go through it. Quickly but basically the first is a recognized property act which speaks to update the Property Line. Our current poverty line is tagged to 1955 spending patterns. What does that mean, anytime, your qualification for everything is based on a measure that assumes one income earner in the home, one stayathome mother, it does not include the cost of childcare, healthcare, or a ton of other things or geographic cost oftu living. And really what the actual cost is in 2019. So this fixes that. This directs the federal government to provide any Property Line which we will talk about more, the second is a pizza prosper which is a sweeping set of housing reform to the entire country which includes a national cap on raising housing prices as well as punishment fore abusive landlords in the United States. The third is known as the embrace act. I will start with mercy and reentry act allows us to open all of our social safety net and ends federal discrimination on our social programs based on people who were formerly incarcerated. One reason that we do that, because one of the number one reasons for recidivism and mass incarceration is a persistent problem, it is poverty. Its because people come out, we refuse and we deny and we really fuserefused we create isolatn so they go to reeses th recidi. The embrace act, were doing the same and we are ending abusive legislation the and similarhe discrimination based on documentation status. It is the kind of a next level piece of legislation and it is something that people are going to say why would you do that,doi believe that we need to acknowledge the contributions that immigrants make inee ameri. Andli if you contribute to our society, i believe you should benefit from our society. In the last as our workers act which creates a federal government to create a store for federal contractors on how good they are to their workers. From predictable schedules, to union participation, to Worker Cooperatives to paid family leave and then it directs the federal government to spend their money with companies that are good to their workers. And then last, directs the United States to finally ratify the un covenant on economic, social and cultural rights. We will dig into that more later. We can move on to the next slide. We are just going to places very quickly. It goes into deptho into what e legislation is. So we can all get so we can dig into a little more. We ran into technical difficulty. Nevermind is a not hooked up to the speakers . That is fine. We can close enough out. Now we can close it out. This video has all the things i just said. It. T worry about it was going to goti into more detail but i will do it because we have followups as well. As i said, it is five bills in one resolution. All of these are tackling the core underlying issues of poverty in America Today. This is just the beginning. It is not by any means and end product, theres a lot more that we need to go. But ill go one byt one so the first thing that we talk about is the society and recognizes and eradicates poverty. As i said, this requires us to update the Property Line. So we can go what this does our first party. We can adapt our federal poverty line to adjust for that. The second, the cost of healthcare, it is not covered in our federal poverty line. They assume that healthcare costs do not exist. The third is work expenses related to childcare, its a huge one. And i said childcare needs, it also includes new necessities. In our federal poverty line, we believe that Internet Access is a new necessity. In order for us to act on this opportunity. The next is the place to prosper act which is the housing legislation that we were talking about. We can go to the next. The place to prosper act, has anyone heard of the sweeping housing legislation passed in the state this year . The statewide one . Kudos to all of our organizers. A lot of the inspiration from this is pursuing the state laws and we are picking them up and trying to apply some of the lessons to the federal level. Which is how i believe the legislation should work from the bottom up. So what this does, they conclude provisions to protect tenants, there is a lot of our laws, we are not focusing on tenants, were focusing on mortgages which is great, we need to protect working and middleclass families. But i dont believe we have enough protection for tenants that are entered federally. We want to improve the quality of our Housing Stock and we want to rein in corporate landlords and we want to ensure that housing is available and affordable to all. One of the tradition says, if you are a landlord and cover a lot of housing stuff, then your documented for abusing and you have a track record of abusing your tenants, then you cannot get a mortgage to build until you get your act together. [applause] that is a huge part of our provision. The last, as i said before, it ends federal discrimination of our social benefits based on documentation status. People say, why should we do that because its very controversial et cetera. Immigrants pay taxes. All immigrants pay taxes whether your documented or undocumented. Immigrants pay for public schools, they help contribute to our society just like anybody else. As a billionaire can get away re taxes anding their we have public systems, and undocumented people should be recognized for the contributions to society as well. [applause] as i said a just society is merciful, that is where the mercy and reentry act comes into play. What the mercy and reentry act does is so often someone becomes incarcerated. A lot of times for unjust reasons, as we seen with the war on drugs. Where people get incarcerated, for ten or 15 years for selling something that people are making millions of dollars selling in california, colorado et cetera. Once you get out, theres a lot of federal programs whether medicare, medicaid, et cetera where you get caught up in the system and are either outright denied or discriminated against because you already paid your debt to Society Years ago. And what this does, it contributes to the pipeline of incarceration and going in and out of the system. When you create a state of economic desperation, thats exactly the kind of environment where you begin to spread mass in her trajan. This does the same exact thing anna says you cannot be discriminated against because you pay your debt to society some time ago. And you fulfill the obligation, we should extend our social safety net to you as well. This one, the uplift of workers act, it creates a lead score for the federal contractors in an enormous amount of our budget and our federal spending goes to contractors. Where the government pays a private contractor to fulfill some kind of need. So i believe that the federal government is going to inject a lot of money into our economy, that money should go into workers pocket and it should go to help establish a just economy for everybody. What this does, it creates a worker friendly score for federal contractors and it says were going to pick at the front for contracts if you offer paid family leave and pay a livingay wage to people and if you have a unionized workforce, if you are a Worker Cooperative and so on. In the last one says a just society guarantees economic, social and cultural rights for all. In the 1970s, the un put forth a covenant on economic and social and cultural rights. 170 International Parties have ratified the covenants of the United States has not. We need to do this. One of the reasons, one of the hunches that i have as to why we have not ratified this is because it essentially codifies 20 of century rights the right to a dignified and safe workplace, the right to an education, the right to healthcare and obviously we dont fulfill or satisfied all those rights in the United States. I think it is about time that we do. That is what advanced societies if we we want to be want tod continue to say that e United States is a leader in the world and we need to be a leader in the human condition and we ooneed to be a leader in human rights and we need to be a leader in equality and equity and we need to be a leader and really creating a robust economic and socially just society. So as i said, these are the countries that have signed on to it but the United States has not. And that is it. In terms of that. [laughter] [applause] now, given all of that, we went to open the floor for questions in this legislation we want to frontline any questions and we will also open the floor to other questions that you haveor and feel free to take it away, i quthink noreen or you, michelle has some questions if you have any more right them down on the slip and we will and them over to you. Wonderful. So abdul. You have the first question and then terry i want to take a moment to acknowledge a couple members d thank you for joinings tonight. Carrie graham . How are you doing ms. Cortez . Im good how are you. Last time we met was in the bronx and asked the question and you gave a great answer. I want to ask it again because its been a long time ago. My question is about the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party has been reaching out to lgbtq concerns and immigration concerns. As they should. But in recent years there is one group that has been left out in its africanamericans and they to some degree feel betrayed or used by the Democratic Party. So when donald trump said what you have to lose, but they decided to stay home and said maybe we have a point. My question is, how can you, your squad friends and people like me reach out to africanamericans especially to sell you society which is been greatly explained. I appreciate that. Thank you abdul. The government. Give him a round of applause. [applause] first of all i emphasize a lot with that sentiment. I understand why people say that. I experience a lot when i am in d. C. Because it feels sometimes like our votes and our support are taken for granted precisely because how reliably democratic or communities are. I see it representing a district that is a safe blue district and people say, youre going to vote for us anyway, we dont need to worry about you and it does not concern you. As a result our concerns and our pursuit for justice. Take a seat. A lot of times are concerned almost to the lack of the line because were not a spring seat. And everyone thinks we have to worry about the swing seats. And so criminal justice, we take the can on that and immigration justice which is also and not an africanamerican issue but a black issue as well. And african immigrants et cetera. And we kick the can on issues of Economic Justice as well, voting reform et cetera. All of a sudden its controversial to talk about these things. And so i understand and empathize with that too. People are saying, we vote for the Democratic Party, why doesnt the Democratic Party vote forge us. Why dont we sent our concerns. And that is why i get into trouble. [laughter] that is why people say, she is a lightning rod on the left in a writing log on the right, one of the reasons why we have controversial within the party, because we will s