February 23, 2019

A Shadowy Conservative Group Has Started a Billboard War with AOC. She Refuses to Stand Down.

It’s all about Amazon.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) at a news conference with members of the Progressive Caucus in Washington on Monday, Nov. 12, 2018.Susan Walsh/AP

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Visitors to New York’s Times Square saw a new billboard earlier this week that spelled out the jobs, wages, and economic activity New York potentially lost due to the Amazon pullout. “Thanks for Nothing, AOC,” it concluded, referring to the popular new congresswoman from Queens, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). The billboard identified its sponsors as the Job Creators Network, a conservative advocacy group led by the CEOs of some of the country’s largest retailers.

They are blaming her for the reversal of Amazon’s decision to open its proposed new headquarters in New York and have plastered a number of different billboards all over the city saying as much. With her fearless social media savvy and capacity to take on opponents, Ocasio-Cortez responded—and launched a back-and-forth between the congresswoman and the conservative group that’s resulted in even more AOC-inspired billboards.

When the first billboard appeared, Ocasio-Cortez quickly clapped back, noting that the expensive stunt helped to prove the point of her Amazon opposition.

It turns out, a main funder of the Job Creators Network is the Mercer family, GOP megadonors who have doled out millions of dollars to conservative causes. A second tweet drew attention to the Job Creators Networks’ Wikipedia entry, highlighting the Mercer’s role in the organization and the fact that the right-wing conservative website Breitbart had promoted its work.

But that wasn’t the end of it.

On Friday, JCN put up two more billboards, mocking the critiques laid out in Ocasio-Cortez’s response. One, borrowing the congresswoman’s own adjective, read, “Hey AOC, saw your wack tweet”. The other takes aim at her “tons of cash” comment. “Hey AOC, this billboard cost about $4,000. But you cost NY 25,000 jobs and $4,000,000,000 in annual lost wages,” it reads. “Ouch!”

As JCN escalated its efforts, so did she, grabbing the opportunity to draw attention to economic inequality. On Saturday she responded to the latest stunt by tweeting about the Mercers’ tax havens that had been discovered in the Panama Papers, a trove of more than 11 million leaked financial documents detailing the offshore entities the world’s wealthiest individuals had used to avoid taxation.

Ocasio-Cortez also noted that the billboards’ placement in Times Square, the most tourist-ridden area of New York, has nothing to do with the interest of the New Yorkers she represents. Quoting a tweet that noted how “Times Square isn’t really NYC,” the congresswoman compared the stunt to an “obscenely rich version” of the scene in The Office when Michael Scott, the show’s clueless manager, calls Times Squares’ Bubba Gump restaurant, a tourist trap, “the heart of civilization.”

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

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