Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Vice President
 Preceded by

 Deputy
 Succeeded by

 Born
 Died
 Nationality
 Political party
 Profession
 Religion

**Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez** (October 13, 1989 - August 6, 2112) also known by her initials, **AOC**, was an American stateswoman and political leader who served as the 48th President of the United States, the second female and the first Latina to hold the office. She was also the youngest President when elected, at the age of 39, beating John F. Kennedy when he was elected in 1960 at the age of 43. A Progressive, she served from 2029 to 2037. AOC led the nation through the worst days of the Flood, the subsequent economic crisis, and the White Tide. She succeeded in putting down the rebellion, reasserting the power of the federal government, and modernizing the U.S. economy.

AOC's landmark Renewal program saw the complete restructuring of the US economy and social welfare system to deal with the myriad of crises that came from the Flood. A dominant leader of the Progress Party, she built the left-wing coalition that united working-class whites and nonwhites, labor unions, professional and unskilled urban and rural workers. The Coalition realigned American politics after the election of 2032, creating the Seventh Party System and defining American leftism for the middle third of the 21st century.

## U.S. Representative (2019-2027)

During her time serving as the Democratic U.S. representative for New York's 14th congressional district, she would frequently spend time on social media, occasionally posting 'vlogs' about her work and stream Q&A sessions (sometimes while playing a video game) to better connect with supporters and directly answer any questions. This would also later carry over to her presidency, although not as frequently. Her supporters would often compare this to fireside chats during the Franklin D. Roosevelt era.

The most famous stream during Ocasio-Cortez's tenure as U.S. Representative is when she streamed her thoughts on 2021 U.S. Capitol Attack on Instagram Live (which was later reuploaded to Youtube). This became a subject matter of debate during her campaign in the 2028 presidential election.

## Governor of New York (2027–29)

After four terms in the U.S. House, she successfully challenged New York Governor Kathy Hochul for renomination in 2026 and won the general election.

## 2028 presidential election

Ocasio-Cortez's success in New York immediately elevated her to the top ranks of Progressive politicians under consideration for the presidency in 2028. The Progressive National Convention was united behind her, and Senator Nina Turner did all in her power to bring Ocasio-Cortez the nomination. In June 2028, the national primary elections took place and Ocasio-Cortez received the second highest number of votes. In her speech launching her general election campaign, Ocasio-Cortez declared, "I offer you this solemn vow, that America shall have a Renewal... This is more than a political campaign. It is a call to arms." The election campaign was conducted under the shadow of the Labor Crisis and the Flood, and the new alliances which they created. Ocasio-Cortez and the Progress Party mobilized the expanded ranks of the poor as well as organized labor, ethnic minorities, urbanites, and rural whites, crafting the Renewal Coalition. Ocasio-Cortez's support among members of the Labor and Green parties, as well as progressive Democrats, led him to an easy victory over her Democratic rival. On the night of her nomination, Ocasio-Cortez chose Governor Dylan J. Price of California to be her running mate, who would continue her path and laid the roots of the New Progressive Era which would dominate American politics for the next decade.

## Presidency (2029-37)

When Ocasio-Cortez was inaugurated on January 20, 2029, the U.S. faced three major crises: the Flood, the Labor Crisis, and what would become the White Tide. Nearly 90 million Americans remained displaced or in refugee camps. Food and fuel shortages were threatening the country with mass starvation. The dollar was on its knees as companies fought to hold onto their workforce with higher wages and benefits. Productivity had stagnated and the housing market had ground to a halt as people sold off property out of desperation. By the evening of November 30th, 39 states were facing some form of domestic terrorism and armed insurrection.

Historians categorized Ocasio-Cortez's program as "resist, relief, and renewal." Resist meant directly combating the most immediate threats to people's survival: insurrectionists and some flooding, in both cases through direct action via the military. Relief was urgently needed by tens of millions of retirees, homeowners, and still displaced climate refugees. Renewal meant fundamental changes to the government and economy. Ocasio-Cortez utilized short form social media to communicate directly with the public, using her persistent optimism to promote even the smallest victories to renew the national spirit.

### **Rebellion and inauguration**

Conservatives were outraged by AOC's election, and in response alt-right groups implemented plans to overthrow the government before she took office. On December 20, 2028, on the anniversary of South Carolina's ordinance of secession, armed members of the Sovereign Citizen's Alliance stormed the Ohio state capitol and declared its rebellion against the federal government. Several other anti-government and white nationalist groups formed pretender governments in the following weeks, none of whom were recognized by AOC who upon taking office invoked the Insurrection Act of 1807 and federalizing the national guard units of every state. By February 1st, 2029 the Posse Comitatus Act was abolished by Congress at AOC's urging, given the number of police departments that proved either unable or unwilling to resist the rebels, while many other cops went so far as to join the insurrectionists. On February 3rd, Ocasio-Cortez ordered fully two-thirds of America's overseas forces back to the homeland to combat the insurrection.

Ocasio-Cortez took executive control of the war and shaped the Federal military strategy. Along with the previous Congressional measures, she invoked presidential war powers, imposed a blockade on rebel controlled ports, extended the state of emergency that began under the Harris administration, suspended *habeas corpus*, and arrested and imprisoned thousands of suspected white nationalists and their sympathizers. She even went so far as to order the arrest of members of Congress and state legislatures that expressed support for the rebels, but had yet to flee to join the rebel governments. Congress even went so far as to declare the Republican Party a terrorist organization and banned its members from ever holding public office.

At no point during her presidency did Ocasio-Cortez refer to the insurrection as a "civil war" and she actively encouraged members of her administration to never use the term either, as she argued it would validate the apocalyptic fantasies of the rebels and undermine confidence in the government.

### **Green New Deal**

Ocasio-Cortez's "First 100 Days" also saw progress on providing immediate relief to those impacted by the Flood and directly resisting rising sea-levels wherever possible. From January 24 to June 16, 2029, she sent Congress a record number of bills, all dealing with the resist and relief elements of her agenda. Many of these bills empowered her administration to take direct control of failing or failed businesses and nationalize what resources were necessary to combat climate change. By the summer of 2029 the AOC administration had transitioned to introducing bills concerned with the final characteristic of her agenda: renewal, or fundamental changes to the country that would last decades. Among these proposals included efforts to directly reduce the buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere and fresh water in the oceans via agencies like AmeriCorps Climate, the Civilian Climate Corps, the Colorado River Authority, the Gulf Reclamation Corporation, and many others.

#### **Refugees and housing**

The issue of housing had become a persistent problem prior to Ocasio-Cortez's election, going back as far as the Great Recession, the number of Americans able to afford homes continually declined after the Crash of 2008. By the Crash of 2027, the housing market had collapsed in the face of tens of millions of climate refugees. Ocasio-Cortez initially addressed this through a series of federal loan buybacks, rent assistance, and limited nationalization to provide immediate relief. Following the initial relief programs, more radical approaches to the housing crisis were proposed. Most home builders had gone bankrupt after the crash of '27, and wealthier immigrants took to new cottage communities and residential malls that were popular among the current generation of homeowners, but with so many foreign and domestic climate refugees many states faced the possibility of temporary camps turning into massive slums. Ocasio-Cortez introduced the National Housing Act of 2029 to foster urban development, funding billions for the HUD to build new residential malls in rural communities and public works projects to support these new communities with infrastructure. Further, the NHA gave HUD the power to compel state an local authorities to adopt "Sprawl Repair" projects to create more affordable, high-density housing by rezoning thousands of square miles of low density suburbs. The federal government built these structures, but transitioned administrative control to the cities and states. Later reforms would see HUD transition the bulk of construction and management powers to state and local urban planning departments. Reforms were also made to renters rights that made it easier for people to move to a new job in a new city. To address the challenge of rebuilding much of the Eastern Seaboard, most of HUD's projects were funded in concert with redevelopment programs through the Army Corps of Engineers.

#### **Financial Service Acts**

Ocasio-Cortez's inauguration on January 20, 2029, occurred in the middle of a bank panic, the very next day she declared a "trading holiday" and called for a special session of Congress to start January 24, at which Congress passed the first Financial Services Act of 2029, which among other things, created a series of public-credit unions through the US Postal Service and absolved much of the country of its credit history. These credit unions were modeled off of several pilot projects created in California, Washington, New York, and Massachusetts that made use of machine learning AI to reduce waste and corruption. This was her first proposed step to recovery. To give Americans confidence in the financial system, Ocasio-Cortez signed the William-Duvall Act that gave the FDIC the power to underwrite non-speculator investments.

Ocasio-Cortez also signed several bills to close corporate tax loopholes, raising the effective tax rate on major corporations from 2% to 20% in 2029, extending taxes on capital gains and personal income, and establishing the first national wealth tax. The bulk of these tax revenues were targeted at supporting new social services and funding public works.

In 2031 the next major Financial Services Act ended the printing of physical currency by the US mint and transitioned the country to an all-digital encrypted currency. This reform also created the Federal Creditworthiness Index, which replaced private credit scoring as the means of measuring credit worthiness for consumers. Federal reserve banking terminals, which had seen a great deal of success in their first two years, were expanded to all federal buildings and could be requested by State and Local governments.

#### **Public Infrastructure**

Shortly after her housing reform package, Ocasio-Cortez moved her legislative agenda toward infrastructure redevelopment, nationalizing local and state hyperloop networks, and funding the construction of connecting lines that would allow anyone in America to easily travel to anywhere else on the continent in the National Transportation Act of 2033. Most of these lines were privately owned before the crash, and the few that were state-owned only ran along historic transit corridors. The new National Hyperloop Network would connect every city and town with more than 25,000 residents to each other, enabling anyone in the country to travel to anywhere else in the continental US in 30 minutes or less. By the time the first national lines were completed, coupled with Ocasio-Cortez's housing reforms, this act served as a major redistribution of wealth from urban areas to rural communities, and made it much easier to manage the new workforce. The Midwest, which during the Great Reset had become known as the "Rust Belt" and/or "the Flyover" would grow into one of the wealthier regions of the country as urban workers would relocate to buy cheap land around residential malls and create high-density residential developments for citizens commuting to major cities and back. This reform would be critical to the Biotech Boom of the 2030s and 40s, as it made it easier for businesses to expand or be created on cheap land while still efficiently reaching customers and investors nationwide.

#### **Labor reforms**

Perhaps no part of Ocasio-Cortez's legacy is more important than the immigration reforms she took shortly after the first Financial Services Acts. The Labor Shortage was the defining challenge of Ocasio-Cortez's presidency. Full employment and high wages had driven inflation to record highs. With demand outstripping production in almost every sector of the economy, cost of living rates were also at record highs. Shortly after taking office, Ocasio-Cortez created the Employment Census and signed several executive orders to empty the nations' climate refugee camps and get the displaced back to work where they were deemed most needed. The Employee Relocation Voucher (ERV) was created in which workers can now be moved to other parts of the country besides their homes much cheaper, making it easier to find jobs nationally, or places that are in dire needs for every sources of labor. Concurrently, the Community Self Sufficiency Program (CSSP) was created to retrain unemployed manufacturers and white-collar workers for trade-skill jobs and help them relocate to where they were most needed through the ERV or other means, using similar project management AIs as had been used in New York when Ocasio-Cortez was still governor. The bulk of this labor force was tasked with rebuilding the effected areas along the North East or standing up public housing. However, even with the relocation and retraining programs, there simply weren't enough workers to get productivity up to acceptable levels.

The obvious solution was to encourage foreign workers to emigrate to the United States, and it became the single most hotly opposed program of the Ocasio-Cortez administration. Mass protests broke out by rural whites when the Labor Relief Act of 2029 was introduced to congress, automatically granting citizenship to any green card holders in the US, amnesty to any illegal immigrants who were not incarcerated, and significantly reduced barriers to entry for new immigrants. The bill passed with a single vote majority in the Senate, and it was met with outright hostility by a vocal minority of the country's Caucasian population.

On February 3, 2030, Ocasio-Cortez signed the Refugee Resettlement Act, making it much easier for climate refugees to gain Green Cards and work in the United States. Additionally, the act also provided public housing for the first year of an immigrant's residence in the United States, along with beneficial social services to reduce the cost of living. Furthermore, Ocasio-Cortez introduced the Immigration Modernization and Reform Act, which catered to skilled and in-training immigrants and international students with higher education, allowing them to easily and smoothly immigrated, become US citizens, or just get a Green Card. The IMRA also created a new open door immigration system that attracted many more immigrants, boosting the amount of labor direly by the country to relieved the economic crisis caused by the Labor Shortages. The LRA, the RRA and the IMRA resulted in millions of refugees and immigrants pouring into the country by the spring and the next few years, winning Ocasio-Cortez a Nobel Peace Prize for reducing the burden of the Refugee crisis on the rest of the planet. However these acts, including the Progressive control over the government after the 2028 election, sparked a wave of civil unrest and conflict on a scale never seen before since the Civil War of the 1860s, which would last for the remainder of Ocasio-Cortez's presidency as Far-right White Nationalist militant groups and secessionist organizations across the country committed acts of domestic terrorism against minority groups and government centers as well as created pretender republics in opposition to the federal government. None of these groups were strong enough or densely packed enough to form a coherent opposition force, but the conflict, known as the White Tide, would be a defining challenge for Ocasio-Cortez's first term.

#### **Welfare Reform**

By the time President Ocasio-Cortez had taken office, 25% of all homeless citizens were over the age of 75. Many were illegally squatting in homes that had been repossessed by banks, and some were lucky enough to be in homes that couldn't be repossessed because the bank that owned it had gone bankrupt. Social Security was all but exhausted of funds, and younger people were screaming for tax relief. Ocasio-Cortez enacted a series of major reforms to reduce the burden on retirees (though many people saw their generation as the cause of the Crash). Public housing programs for the elderly were put into effect, and millions of foreclosed homes were seized by the government to serve as retirement communities. The Social Security Amendments of 2029 created a progressive tax to cover the cost of these reforms, while also extending Medicare as a right of birth and instituted new COLA and chained CPI methods to calm resentful members of the Flood Generation. The retirement age was progressively raised and ultimately removed for people under 50 to be replaced with a requirement that a citizen must demonstrate that they are infirm to receive benefits.

Ocasio-Cortez's most lasting change to public welfare was the Medicare For All Act of 2029, also known as the Medicare Reform Act or the National Health Care Act, and the Income Freedom Act of 2029. The MFAA extended Medicare to every citizen, created a single-payer universal healthcare system that many Americans have desired after many years and charged the Department of Health and Human Services to build public hospitals and pharmacy services. The IFA dissolved many of the nation’s welfare programs and created a regressive basic income system dependent on income level and progressively drawing down benefits rather than simply cutting them off. Ocasio-Cortez's goal was to reform the economy to allow the major of workers who were freelancers or independent contractors to have a sustainable career choice by effectively taxing companies the revenue they would have spent on employee pensions and healthcare, and covering those services as government programs; while the RBI would give the unemployed a cushion that would not trap people into the inter-generational welfare system of the previous generations.

#### **Foreign policy, 2029–2033**

Despite Ocasio-Cortez's more moderate background, she acted with great care not to provoke neoliberal and globalist sentiment. Ocasio-Cortez's landmark message to the International Monetary Fund in 2029 effectively ended any major efforts by the international community to collaborate on ending the worldwide depression, and allowed Ocasio-Cortez a free hand in economic policy. Ocasio-Cortez, like many other Progressives, being at her core a serious economic progressive, economic nationalist, protectionist, a proponent of limited fair trade and potentially a mutually beneficial trade system, was a lifelong critic of the free-for-all international system free trade. As a result, securing American economic dominance and crafting advantageous trade deals for the US and its allies if needed was among many of her objectives.

The main foreign policy initiative of Ocasio-Cortez's first term was the New Community Policy, which was a re-evaluation of U.S. policy towards Latin America. Since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, this area had been seen as an American sphere of influence. American forces were deployed across the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean and many former island nations were functionally U.S. protectorates. Many Latin American nations believed this to be the prelude to renewed American intervention in their countries. Ocasio-Cortez organized and shepherded the passage of the Rio de la Plata Treaty, which re-affirmed American commitment to the sovereignty and stability of Latin American, providing economic aids and organized the first joint task forces for regional security with South American Nations that would lead to a series of war games with Latin American nations.

#### **Foreign policy, 2033–2037**

Ocasio-Cortez was the first President to recognize the dangers of Japan and Turkey's expansionist policies in Eurasia. While most of the public was sympathetic to Japan's refugee policy, Ocasio-Cortez saw the risk of Japan's Extraterritorial Districts in the North Pacific, and remarked privately to her Secretary of State, "this is gonna lead to another world war if we're not careful." Ocasio-Cortez publicly supported Turkish, Polish and Japanese peacekeeping efforts in the former Eurasian Union, but maintained limited involvement by the United States in favor of supporting regional/local powers to balance each-other. Ocasio-Cortez believed that by supporting unification factions in China and bolstering Korea an effective counterweight could be created to keep Japan in check, but found little support from the public who were largely glad to be rid of nation-building adventurism in Eurasia.

In 2034, Ocasio-Cortez quietly supported the Defense Department's Project ASGARD as a last option against Japanese and Turkish expansion in Eurasia. Ocasio-Cortez believed that a strong orbital defense network would be the best way to coordinate a truly global military and counter any expansive powers. Ocasio-Cortez supported heavy investments in defense programs that moved US military power back to American territory, effectively completing the transition from a military with a global presence to a force that could easily and rapidly be deployed globally while being stationed at home.

## After her Presidency

Following her Presidency, Ocasio-Cortez took over leadership of Habitat for Humanity, becoming its most high profile member and retooling the organization to focus on refugee resettlement in the 2040s. In the lead up to WWIII, Ocasio-Cortez became more outspoken about Japanese actions in the North Pacific, and was briefly considered for the position of Secretary of State by President Jacobi. During the war, she became a major proponent of the Jacobi administration's policies and campaigned for her in 2052. Ocasio-Cortez also brought Habitat in as one of the founding organizations of the Earth Working Group, and led the charge on adopting colonial construction techniques for terrestrial housing problems.

Ocasio-Cortez was one of Oscar Lachman's most outspoken critics, and during the leadup to the election of 2084, the Progress party introduced an amendment to the constitution that would have removed term limits for Presidents who'd been out of office for more than 20 years, in a clear bid to draft Ocasio-Cortez. Ocasio-Cortez actually opposed this amendment, and it never successfully passed the House. Ocasio-Cortez argued that Lachman's deportations were unconstitutional and unethical, and hotly opposed his privatization campaigns for many government services. She positioned Habitat to aid the Mexican government in resettling the millions of Mexican Americans in northern Mexico, but later distanced the organization as Mexico began its occupation of Central America.

Ocasio-Cortez spent her last years trying to convince Congress to lighten immigration policy for Mexicans. Her death in 2112, at the age of 122, was met with a national day of mourning and thousands turned out for her funeral. Ocasio-Cortez was regarded as a hero to Millennials, Generation Z, and the broad working-class. Historians consider her to be one of the 21st Century's greatest Presidents, and one of its most successful post-Presidents, while also compared her to Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Dwight D. Eisenhower.