Saturday is not only the first day of the Memorial Day weekend, it’s also a holiday from the three presidential candidates seeking Southland votes.
None of the three major hopefuls will be in the Los Angeles area, and only Bernie Sanders will still be campaigning in California, bringing his demand for a national political upheaval to Santa Barbara and Santa Maria. Hillary Clinton is back in New York for what’s called some time off while Donald Trump returns to the east coast.
But on Friday, Sanders was giving his pitch to backers in San Pedro while Hillary was in Oakland. Trump was in Fresno to back farmers against the state’s environmental regulations in the war over water use. He then went to a giant rally at the San Diego Convention Center where a noisy crowd of protesters was met by hundreds of police. Officers made some arrests during the demonstration.
Sanders, on his sixth straight day of Southland campaigning Friday ahead of the June 7 California primary, was the only one of the three in the Los Angeles area.
“I tell you it is too late for establishment politics and establishment economics,” Sanders told the union-dominated crowd of about 1,000 people at the Los Angeles Maritime Museum. “We need a political revolution.”
Sanders used the speech to again criticize presumptive Republican presidential nominee Trump and criticize corporate greed.
“A moral economy is not an economy where CEOs make tens of millions of dollars a year, ship our jobs abroad and take away health care from their workers,” he said.
Sanders added later, “Our ideas are the future of this country. Let’s stand up. Let’s fight for them.”
Sanders also met at Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area in Baldwin Hills with anti-fracking activists and residents of Porter Ranch who had to flee their homes because of a natural gas leak.
“The idea that children are coming down with one ailment after another because they’re breathing chemicals in the air is clearly not acceptable to me,” Sanders said.
The 74-year-old Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist who would be the nation’s first Jewish president, was also interviewed on the HBO talk show “Real Time with Bill Maher.”
— City News Service