“Corrupt Politics!” AOC SLAMS Trump And Billionaire Influence At Workers’ Rally

Thank you so much. Before I begin, I just have to say there may or may not be a little bit of Spanglish here. Yo soy puertorriqueña, so por favor, disculpe el acento, y también nuyorriqueña, además. We're just going to start there. But how are we all doing today? I'm so deeply excited and grateful to be here with each and every one of you because you all here in Bakersfield and in the Central Valley in just 10 days are going to change the United States of America. And you are going to do it by voting for, organizing, and electing our hermano Randy Villegas para el Congreso de los So thank you all so much. I just landed here in, I just landed in Fresno last night. And we landed here from Maine, where Troy Jackson is running for the United States Senate. And it's incredible to see what is happening across the country and also the role, the deeply individual and specific role that so many communities play in our country. each unique and different and as I was driving from Fresno out here to Bakersfield today I was looking out the window and I don't know if many of you all saw it but there was this incredible rainbow do you all see that today incredible rainbow a double rainbow if you all saw it It's a sign. It's a sign. But under that rainbow, we saw all of the fields, the crops, the bounty that the Central Valley provides for the United States. Bounty is picked and harvested by the people of the Central Valley. Second, third generation farm workers, new farm workers that have arrived from all over the world and that have been here for generations, that have built and fed nearly every American in the United States. And as I drove and looked out that window, as I looked over the citrus, the oranges, the almonds, the olive trees, everything throughout the state, everything. I thought about what happened here 61 years ago in Delano. I thought about the farm workers' strike where so many workers here in the Central Valley walked off the great fields demanding better wages and dignity. And I thought about all of the stakes that were out there for our farm workers here in the Central Valley. People were living in homes owned by the corporations that employed them. And standing up to the powerful meant risking your home, your family, your livelihood, being displaced. People were paid 10 cents for a 28-pound lug out here in the Central Valley. And they had everything to lose. Everything to lose. And the courage that it took for Dolores Huerta, the Filipinos that stood up, for the Mexican farm workers who voted to join their strike, for the working people who said, there is a limit to fear. There is a limit to what we can lose. And at a certain point, on your knees, we have to stand up and fight for our rights and our dignity. When those farm workers first tried to initiate that strike, people brought in scab workers from all over the country to try to undercut them. And at first it looked like it wasn't going to work. It looked initially like they had found a workaround. But then the people of the Central Valley called on the rest of the country to help them. called on a nationwide boycott of grapes until their needs were met and what we found was that the people answered the call the national strike on grapes from consumers from New York and Texas and across the country allowed everyday people to say I'm not buying grapes until our brothers and sisters in the Central Valley get paid what happened Bakersfield you know the story is that it worked. Powerful growers had to sit across the table from the very workers that they had underestimated. And what we saw was one of the most inspiring and powerful labor movements in the history of the United States with the United Farm Workers. The heritage of the Central Valley, history and the culture of this place. Because those farm workers didn't just win a contract, they won dignity, they won rights, and they won an inalienable role in the entire country of the United States. I bring that into this room because the heritage of that fight, where there were countless of so many workers, there were so many workers that have come and gone from the Central Valley since then, two of them were a mother and a father who gave birth to several children. And they eventually set up an auto body shop whose son and their son helped them make ends meet in that auto body shop. That's the American dream at work, where we start from nothing and we can make something of ourselves, even if not in the short term, over the course of generations. That young boy's name was Randy Villegas. About a year ago, Bernie Sanders and I came here to Bakersfield. We're under the backdrop of fight in Washington, where there was about a trillion dollars in health care cuts on the table. We are talking about cuts to Medicaid. We're talking about increases in your private insurance. People on Medicare who rely on Medicaid for long-term care and home care all of our lives were on the line and so Senator Sanders and I decided to go across the country because we knew that neither he nor I alone could stand up to that but millions of people put together can to working class communities across the country and we came here to Bakersfield last April and Dolores Huerta was there and I remember sitting with her and holding her hand and feeling how intergenerational this fight and this dream is. I myself am the daughter of a house cleaner. My mom cleaned houses. I cleaned houses with her growing up to afford, you know, lessons, SAT lessons so that I could try to apply to college. And Randy is no different. The son of two auto body shop workers. Farm workers turned auto body shop workers trying to make ends meet one of the first in his family to go to college the only way we're going to change this country is with working people supporting other working people to break down the doors of congress and allow the working class to walk through them in bakersfield and when he worked in his family's auto shop he went from bakersfield college all the way to a doctorate. He made a choice that tells you everything about him. He decided to come and to stay home. He became a professor, helping other first-generation students follow in his footsteps. Students whose parents worked the fields, run neighborhood businesses, and have spent their lives trying to give their children more than they had. And those families are all too often missing from the picture when people talk about the working class in America. All too often. And what we have before us is an opportunity to send a direct message that we are here. That we exist. Y estamos presentes y vamos a cambiar este país. Por lo mejor. For the better. For the better. Because there is nothing to be afraid of when it comes to to the diversity of this country changing and evolving America. There's nothing to be afraid of because we have always been a nation of working people who have come here with hope and nothing but the shirts on our backs to be honest and make something of ourselves for our children. There's nothing to be afraid of in that. And when I think about that rally that we had about a year ago, It was precisely to warn people like David Valadão to not hurt the very people who elected him. We went there to send a warning. Don't do this. You don't have to do this. We don't have to cut the healthcare of the very working people who feed this nation in order to line an insurance executive's pocket. We don't have to fund division and hatred and fear in our communities, of family separation and violence and knocks on our doors without a warrant. We don't have to do that in order to line a billionaire's pocket. We can stand with the working people of this country. Instead of cutting our healthcare, we can guarantee it for everyone as a right. It's not just a question of who Randy goes with. It's a question of who we go with. Because this congressional district is one of the youngest congressional districts in the United States of America. We have the opportunity to take the reins and to give direction to where our future will be headed. And I gotta tell you folks, the future is not with David Valadão. It's simply not. The future is Randy Villegas. The future is the son of immigrants and an auto body shop worker. The future is a young man who became the first in his family to go to college. The future is that young man who has dedicated himself to his community. And I want to close with this, because those six decades ago, those 61 years ago, in that Delano strike, They had a saying, one of the mottos of the strike was peregrinacion, penitencia y revolución. Pilgrimage, penance and revolution. The pilgrimage at that time was about the walks and the marches to the state capitals and the municipal capitals. the marches that they had to many of their political organizing sites and for that was theirs uh then but we have our own pilgrimages today whether it's the pilgrimages that our parents make to those farmlands to harvest crops to give us a better future or whether it's the pilgrimage that their children us we must make to the ballot box to change the future for all of us We have a pilgrimage to the poll sites in just a few days. We have a pilgrimage to your mailbox if you're just sending in that ballot. Second piece, penitencia, penance. The farm workers believed that the pain that we endured was purifying, that the hardship, that the blistered and calloused hands, that our aches and our bodies were preparation for the difficult political struggle that we had to endure, that we had to go through that to understand what it took to stand in solidarity with one another. And I want to give the message that the Central Valley and Bakersfield has paid that penance for a very long time. We have paid the penance in the fear of our families being separated. We have paid the penance in being underpaid for work that is worth far more than what is reflected on our paycheck. We have paid the penance in being denied at the doctor's office and in the bills that we get from our care. We have paid the price and it is time for that penance to prepare us for the third piece, revolución, change, cambio, transformación. Because when we pull that ballot, when we fill out that ballot, we understand that it is not the culmination, but it is simply a step in the larger journey that we have to reorient the United States from a corrupt politics that is bought and paid for by the 1% and the elite, To a nation that centers and honors the dignity of working people with higher wages, breaking up the monopolies that are driving up our prices, and guaranteeing health care to every single one of us as a right. To do that not once, but soon with our help twice. Because he had to win, he will have had to have won, not just one, but two different kinds of elections. and the first was in a primary where he took on the elite of our own party and won. Randy already stood up to the pre-chosen by the elite and won, and now we have to help him do it again. We've got the big fish to fry in November. I want to thank each and every one of you because it is only going to be with us that he is capable of doing that. Democrats and registered Democratic voters have been out-registered in this district against Republicans for a very long time, actually. And yet a Republican has won the election here for many, many cycles. That only happens when we stay home. It only happens because their fear keeps us home. I understand that it's not just apathy. I understand that it's also intimidation. So many of us, if not most of us, if not nearly all of us, come from mixed status families. And we don't want that target on our back. But just like 61 years ago, Bakersfield, we can't live on our knees anymore. We have to stand up and cast our ballot for our brothers, for our sisters, for our mothers, for our fathers, for our neighbors, and we have to tell them I don't care how many people you send out in those streets, nothing is going to stop us from casting our ballot and changing this country. Work of this cycle, I want you all not just to cast your ballot, but check in on your friends, on your families, on your neighbors. Ask them if they've sent in theirs. Don't take it for granted. You might be the one person that reminded your friend that they needed to send in their ballot if they would have otherwise forgotten. You might be the one person that helped your co-worker develop the courage to go to their poll site on election day. You might be the one person that makes a difference between Congressman Randy Villegas and the incumbent winning. It is up to you. And so I want to thank you all so much because I know deep in my heart That you will, that you to introduce the man of the hour Subscribe to One India and never miss an update. Download the One India app now