Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) held a "Fight the Oligarchy" event in Folsom, California on Tuesday.
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00:00Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all so much. You know, I heard that they were that someone started flying a plane with a banner that said this is Trump country. It sure don't look like it today.
00:30I don't think this is Trump country. I think this is our country because we're not afraid of them anymore. Are we? I want to thank each and every one of you for making the effort to be here today. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
01:00Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
01:30Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
02:00Thank you. In my heart, I want to thank you for such a warm welcome. And we are all here together because we share in the frustration and the heartache that comes from watching those in power actively tear down or refuse to fight for everyday working Americans
02:30of power, greed, and corruption is taking over our country like never before. Oligarchy.
02:42And we must acknowledge forthright the terrifying moments that we are in right now, that what we are hearing and seeing with our own eyes is in fact happening.
02:58We are watching as our neighbors, students, and friends are being fired, targeted, and disappeared. It is real. People we love are being targeted and harassed just for being LGBTQ.
03:17Our co-workers, U.S. citizens, and immigrants alike are being disappeared off the street by men in vans with no uniform. Educators are being fired for teaching American history accurately.
03:38And activists are being fired. And activists are being detained with no charge or evidence for using their First Amendment rights, especially if they are using those First Amendment rights to speak up for Palestinians and to end the war in Gaza.
03:59In fact, the Trump administration admits that it has jailed a young father and husband, Mahmoud Khalil, without any evidence or charge of a crime.
04:13They admit that they've thrown Mahmoud in a cell thousands of miles away from his family because he attended a protest and they did not like the content of his speech.
04:26But I want to be very clear, Folsom. Donald Trump's detention of Mahmoud Khalil for his speech is anti-American, and we demand his release, along with the release of Rumeza Ozturk, who he is also jailing for writing an op-ed in her school paper.
04:48And we also demand the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia in El Salvador.
05:00And we tell President Bukele if we believe in democracy, he must be returned. It is criminal that he is being held abroad.
05:08And we demand these things because we do have power in these, in this moment. All of us do. Everyday people do. And it will never, ever just be institutions or politicians and officials alone that uphold our democracy.
05:33It will always be the people, the masses who refuse to comply with authoritarian regimes, who are the last and strongest defense of our country and our freedoms.
05:48You, Folsom! You! We know that a better world is possible, and we are willing to do something about it.
06:00But to get there, we need to be honest about how we got to where we are right now.
06:09Because this moment did not come out of nowhere, Folsom. It has been a long time coming.
06:18The destruction of our rights and our democracy is directly tied to the growing and extreme wealth inequality that has been building in America for years.
06:33It is not a coincidence that billionaires like Elon Musk have dumped billions into this election to support Donald Trump.
06:48He sure is as hell is not doing it for charity.
06:53For years, we have known that our political system has slowly but surely become dominated by big money and billionaires.
07:03And time after time, we have seen how our government and laws are more responsive to corporations and lobbyists than everyday people and voters.
07:15And we also know that the agenda of dark money to keep our wages low and to loot our public goods like Social Security and Medicare to give to the rich.
07:29We know that this is deeply unpopular with the American people, Republican, Independent and Democrat alike.
07:40Look at what Republicans in Congress have been quietly doing.
07:45They have been voting to advance cuts on hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid and veterans benefits so that they can take that money and give it to their donor class.
07:59All in the form of tax cuts.
08:00All in the form of paying for tax cuts for the rich and sweetheart government contracts for their companies like SpaceX.
08:09And Folsom, you know who voted for that by the way?
08:14The man who represents you right here in Congress, Kevin Kiley.
08:24But you know, you know how many people are here in Folsom today?
08:2926,000 of you have gathered to tell Kevin Kiley, hell no, hands off our Medicare, hands off our Medicaid, hands off our Social Security.
08:45Kevin Kiley.
08:46Kevin Kiley knows that this is not what you want.
08:52He knows that it is deeply unpopular.
08:56He knows that it hurts the people of Folsom.
09:00But he is not there to serve working families.
09:03He is there to serve himself and the billionaire class that put him there.
09:08But he knows that the only chance that he has to get away with such unpopular and destructive decisions is to stoke deep divisions along race, identity, and culture to keep all of us fighting and distracted.
09:33And this has been the big money playbook, not just now, but for decades.
09:39And we are not going to fall for it anymore.
09:45But Folsom, this is why Donald Trump is not an aberration.
09:53He is the logical, inevitable conclusion of an American political system dominated by corporate and dark money.
10:02And if we are to defeat him, we must defeat the system that created him.
10:08Money in politics is the hand of oligarchy.
10:14America, we are at a crossroads.
10:19We can either have extreme wealth inequality with the toxic division and corruption that it requires to survive.
10:29Or we can have a fair economy for working people along with the democracy and freedoms that uphold it.
10:41We cannot have both.
10:46I grew up in a working class family.
10:51My mom cleaned houses.
10:53And my dad worked on a small business.
10:56And my parents worked themselves to the bone so that my brother and I could just have a shot.
11:04The American dream.
11:06And for a moment there, it looked like we were going to make it.
11:10We had a home.
11:12Bills were getting a little less stressful to pay.
11:15And I was doing well in public school.
11:18And what may have looked like a modest life to others was a dream come true for us.
11:27But suddenly, when I was a teenager, my dad was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer.
11:35And after a long fight, we lost him.
11:38My dad actually passed away in September of 2008, just as the economy crashed in the Great Recession and millions of jobs across the country vanished.
11:50It felt like the little world of our family fell apart, just as the larger world was falling apart, too.
11:59And overnight, my mom was left alone to figure out how to provide and put two kids through school, keep our house, pay off our medical bills, all on a house cleaner salary.
12:13And that is how I became a waitress to help pay the bills.
12:20Because at that time, just as it is now, it was millions of working families who paid the price while billionaires and thieves who defrauded our financial system got off richer than ever before.
12:38And not a single one of them went to jail.
12:41And now that is the story that Republicans mock, not mine, but all of ours, when they say that a waitress or a working person is unqualified to serve in Congress.
12:58But the fact is, Folsom, many of us are far more qualified to know what real life is really like than any of them ever will.
13:11And I tell this story not because it is special, but because of how common and normal it is.
13:19And how normal this barbarism is of how so many people are allowed to live today.
13:26And while the details may differ, so many of us knows what it feels like for life to be one bad day, one bad piece of news, or one major setback from feeling like it's all going to fall apart.
13:42We don't have to live like this anymore, Folsom.
13:49We can make a new world, Folsom, a better country where we fight for the dignity of all people.
13:57And it looks like living wages, California.
14:00It looks like stable housing.
14:03It looks like guaranteed health care.
14:06And respect for all our differences, no matter who we are or where we come from.
14:14Oligarchy or democracy.
14:18And we are here today because we choose democracy.
14:25We choose freedom.
14:28And that means we must choose to out-organize the oligarchy.
14:34We must do away with the power of big money.
14:38And that is why, even as a waitress with a long shot campaign, I decided I would never take money from lobbyists or corporations, and it's why I never will.
14:54When I first got to Congress, I was genuinely shocked by how the place worked, even having run against dark money in the first place.
15:04The everyday influence of corruption and dark money was astonishing.
15:10We have somehow conditioned ourselves in Congress to believe that it's normal for elected representatives who swear an oath to the American people to day-trade individual stock and make millions
15:27with the sensitive information that we are entrusted with for the purpose of governing.
15:34How can anyone possibly make an objective vote on health care, energy, or war when their personal money is tied up in pharmaceutical companies, oil and gas companies, or defense company stocks?
15:52You can't.
15:53You can't.
15:54And we saw this play out this week with Trump's corrupt and disastrous tariff scheme.
16:01We can see now that his tariff shuffle didn't have anything to do with manufacturing like they claimed.
16:09I hope we recognize now that it was all about manipulating the markets so that he could
16:15quietly enrich his friends who bought the dip before revising, reversing it all in the morning.
16:24Folsom, what I'm about to say is a matter of fact.
16:31Donald Trump is a criminal.
16:35He was found guilty of 34 felony counts of fraud, liable for sexual abuse.
16:43Of course he is lying and manipulating the stock market too.
16:48And if Donald Trump wants to find the rapists and criminals in this country, he needs to look in a mirror today.
17:00And to be clear, I don't care what party you are, Democrat or Republican, it doesn't matter how powerful one is or what position they hold,
17:18members of Congress holding and trading individual stock is wrong.
17:22It is corrosive.
17:23It is destructive.
17:24And it needs to be banned.
17:27You know, just this year, earlier this year, I was named to the Energy and Commerce Committee in the House of Representatives.
17:40And this is one of the most powerful committees in all of Congress.
17:47It oversees two thirds of the American economy.
17:51Health care, manufacturing, trade, energy, communications, you name it.
17:57And for years, lobbyists fought to keep me off of this committee because they don't like what they don't control.
18:07And an interesting thing happened on the day that it was announced that I would be assigned to the committee.
18:14Our phones rang off the hook and my office's inboxes were flooded by every corporate lobbyist under the sun.
18:23All of a sudden, they wanted to be best friends.
18:27But you know what, Folsom, because of your support, because of gatherings like here today, because you allow me to not take a dime in corporate money, you free me to say no.
18:44You free me to fight for Medicare for all people.
18:49You free me to fight for a renewable energy economy.
18:55But not everyone is so lucky.
18:58I've seen firsthand how these groups bully and pressure members of Congress.
19:03They threaten to take their money away or to spend it against them if they don't do what they want.
19:09And what they want is for our lives to be as expensive as possible on the lowest possible wage.
19:18What they want is for as many people to be exploited in America as possible.
19:24And it trickles down to how life feels for working people today.
19:31So I want us to understand that this constant pressure that we feel in our lives, of the water rising up to our throats, the impossibility to afford anything easily, the fear of speaking up or being who we are in public, the bitter divisions driven more by online algorithms than the truth, the crumbling of our rights and
19:53protections understand that this right now is what it feels like to be governed by billionaires.
20:03Not someday, but right now.
20:06And the first step is to open our eyes to that.
20:10Because, of course, it is a system that depends on division to enable its inequality that will favor a president who is the best at dividing us and the most skilled at corruption.
20:26And it will also reward the Republicans in Congress who support that agenda no matter what crimes are committed, including crimes from the White House.
20:39Big money is how we got Donald Trump.
20:43His whole presidency began with launching tools for bribery, meme coins and cryptocurrencies to fleece normal people and move money in the dark.
20:54Extortion settlements from media companies and law firms who gladly pay the price.
21:01And he even removed duly elected officials, including Republican ones, from the chamber of the inauguration to make room for who he really wants in charge, the unelected billionaires who were standing behind him.
21:19They have one central economic mission to make billionaires richer at the expense of all of us.
21:26So it does not surprise us that their first economic mission has been to smear and target Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security to fire our federal workers and to abandon our veterans for hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts so that they can hand that money off to their donors.
21:48And the things that they say are crazy, crazy.
21:57Medicaid is one of the most efficient and effective public systems, lowest in fraud that we have in the United States.
22:11Just yesterday, just yesterday, just yesterday I saw on television, on Fox News, you had this woman, Janine Pirro.
22:20Crazy thing about Janine Pirro is that she's from Westchester County where I went to public school and it's like, wow, how things have evolved there.
22:29Anyways, so Janine Pirro goes on television, she says, as though this is fraud.
22:36She says that they found so many babies and two year olds and four year olds who were receiving Social Security.
22:44I've got a notice for you, Janine Pirro.
22:48Those babies get Social Security because their parents died.
22:53That's not a waste.
22:55That's humanity.
22:57That's America.
22:58That's the country that we fight for.
23:01Those are the promises we make to one another.
23:04That is what it means to be in a civilized society.
23:09It's not waste.
23:10It is the best of us.
23:15Folsom, I know that it at times can look impossible out here for the Republicans to be defeated.
23:25But that is not true.
23:27It is simply not true.
23:28It is simply not true.
23:30From the waitress who is now speaking to you today, I can tell you impossible is nothing.
23:40Miracles start with mustard seeds.
23:43And that is what each and every one of you represent today.
23:48Small miracles of faith in ourselves, in each other, and in the refusal to give up.
23:56So Folsom, we are here for the long haul.
24:01For the school boards and the community associations.
24:05For small business groups and town councils.
24:09For public art and gestures of inclusion.
24:13And we will build from there.
24:16Because Kevin Kiley will not be a congressman for much longer if you've got anything to do with it.
24:25And by the way, as they try to cut Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security, we just need to peel off three Republican congressmen in the entire country.
24:44And I got a feeling that you might do it right here in Folsom.
24:54And if you do it Folsom, then the people here today will have saved Medicaid for the entire United States of America.
25:03We stand with you.
25:04We stand with you.
25:05We are here with you.
25:06And we will support you.
25:09Beyond elections, our task is also to build community.
25:15Block associations, volunteer groups, advocacy organizations, PTAs, church and faith groups.
25:24Because community is the most powerful building block we have to defeat authoritarianism and root out corruption.
25:34This is the path to guaranteeing health care to every American.
25:41To establishing a living minimum wage.
25:44To take on skyrocketing rents and mortgages.
25:47To tackle the climate crisis.
25:49And establish a country where the American dream is actually possible for all of us.
25:56So I will end where I began.
26:03We may all come from different places.
26:06But we share so many of the same experiences.
26:10So to all those who came here today unsure of whether or not this is where you belong,
26:17I want to say affirmatively that you do.
26:21No matter if you have all the right words to say.
26:27No matter your race, religion, gender identity or status.
26:32You know, if you even voted for Donald Trump in the past and are open to changing your mind,
26:38come on in.
26:43If you are willing to fight for someone you don't know, you are welcome here.
26:48If you are willing to fight for working people regardless of who they are, how they identify or where they come from,
26:55you are welcome here.
26:58Because here everyone is valued.
27:01But we have to stand together.
27:05We cannot be tempted to turn in our neighbors or be fooled into thinking that we're really that much different
27:13than the trans kid who wants to get accepted at school.
27:20We can't fall for the ruse that we're that different than the dreamer who wants to provide for their family and fulfill our country's promise.
27:32It is standing together without exception to reject division.
27:38That is the only way that we can win.
27:42So I hope that you see this movement is not about partisan labels or purity tests, but it is about class solidarity.
27:51The thousands of you who came out here today to stand together and say our lives deserve dignity and our work deserves respect.
28:06We are here to make a sacred promise to one another.
28:10And our goal is to commit to building the kind of country that we all deserve.
28:16And we will make that promise to take care of each other on our worst days and to share in the successes of our best.
28:25Thank you Folsom.
28:27Thank you for having me.
28:32And with that.