Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (previously) stunned the Democratic establishment when she comprehensively kicked the ass of finance-friendly, seemingly untouchable Democrat-in-name-only incumbent Joe Crowley in a New York City primary race that she won on a Democratic Socialist platform of abolishing ICE, Medicare for all, a jobs guarantee, a housing guarantee, gun control, relief for Puerto Rico, and gun control.
Ocasio-Cortez came to national attention in part thanks to a beautiful, inspiring, brilliant campaign video made for less than $10,000 by Means of Production, who have also gained national name-recognition among polticos as the kinds of visual storytellers whose work can change the world.
Means of Production have just released another campaign video for a Democratic Socialist candidate, Kaniela Ing, who is standing for the Democratic nomination in Hawai'i's 1st Congressional District.
Ing's platform is very similar to Ocasio-Cortez's: "Medicare for all, free college and bold action on climate change" and Ing is clear that Trump is a symptom, not the cause, and the thing he is the symptom of is a looted America whose enablers in both the Democratic and Republican parties have made finance and wealth extraction their true priorities for decades.
His campaign video zeroes in on precarity brought on by soaring housing prices, stagnating wages, and mass inequality, and calls for solidarity to create broadly shared prosperity instead of the oligarchy Trump (and the Democratic establishment) represent.
The video sold me. I just sent him $50.
"It's easy to blame Republicans, to blame Trump for our problems, but we have to look in the mirror," Ing says in the ad as images of luxury hotel and condo development in Hawaii flash across the screen. "Who controls our state? Who controls our party?"The ad also delves into the darker colonial history of Hawaii and alludes to the workers' rebellions by native Hawaiians that took place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
"As a kid, I remember my grandmother telling me stories of my ancestors," Ing says in the ad. "She told me how our people were exploited by colonizers and forced to work on plantations. … If my great-grandparents didn't stand up to the corporate establishment of their time, I would still be on the plantation."
Ing, the only native Hawaiian running in the primary, said that he felt it was important to feature that part of Hawaii's past.
"I just had to get in Hawaii's history and share our vision," Ing told Mic. "You grow up in Hawaii and you're taught to be nostalgic of the simpler time of the plantation. It's revisionist history. … People were shot and killed during the workers uprisings and we should really be nostalgic for that history of struggle."
Ocasio-Cortez campaign ad creators release powerful new video for another socialist candidate [AP Joyce/Mic]
(via Naked Capitalism)
