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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff recently admitted that the Green New Dealwas not conceived as an effort to deal with climate change, but instead a “how-do-you-change-the-entire economy thing” -- a remark likely to fuel Republican claims that the deal is nothing more than a thinly veiled socialist takeover of the U.S. economy.
“The interesting thing about the Green New Deal is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all,” Saikat Chakrabarti said in May, according to The Washington Post.
He reportedly made the remarks to Sam Ricketts, climate director for 2020 hopeful and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, who the Post says greeted the statement with “an attentive poker face.”
“Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Chakrabarti then asked. “Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”