Bernie Sanders Holds Press Conference on Fracking in Spreckels, California (6-1-16)
[font color="navy" size="4" face="times new roman"]Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders holds a press conference dealing with fracking at the Veterans Memorial Building in Spreckels, California.[/font]
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Put the horribly polluted water back in. Who can't see the Whiz-Dumb in that? 
The result was the gentrification of Oakland where it's now nearly impossible to find a 1 bedroom apartment for under $3,000 a month!
Gentrification is a terrible phenomenon whereby the poor and the middle class--the people who do the actual work of an economy--are shoved out of their local communities, while a few people get very, very rich from skyrocketing rents and house prices and land prices, and from our tax dollars in development ("gentrification"
projects. It is also a phenomenon that destroys small local businesses, and local manufacturing, when glitzy chains like Starbucks and the Gap move in. (--Gap, which manufactures Gap clothing with slave labor in the Mariana Islands and further points east, using cotton from poisoned land and waters in Asia; Gap, whose family is poisoning vast tracks of redwood forest, as we speak, in northern California, by deliberately poisoning native oaks and then leaving the dead trees standing, a fire, poison and global warming hazard**).
Jerry Brown, whose father I canvassed for in 1960, and whom members of my family worked for, as early as Jerry's first election (to the L.A. Community College Board) through his first term as governor, has become a weathervane like Clinton. He has not, as far as I know, pocketed half a billion dollars from Wall Street, nor destroyed other countries leaving ISIS in charge, and laughing about it, like Clinton--he is not that kind of corrupt, nor is he a warmonger--he is a corporatist, in other words, a "trickle-down" Reaganite.
So I am not surprised that he endorsed Clinton. I was hoping he would stay neutral, at least, because his original instincts in politics, through his first term as governor, were very positive for us ordinary people, and I find it hard to believe that he doesn't loathe Clinton's corruption and her Neo-Con foreign policy. He did seem to be holding his nose when he endorsed, and spoke words of praise for Bernie Sanders as he did so. But for him to pile on to the mound of Corporate Democrats who are skeert of Clinton and her punitive ways, or worse, who buy her "trickle down" bullshit, was pretty disgusting of him.
This is how Corporate Democrats operate in California: They declare a $15/hr minimum wage by executive order, in order to preempt the campaign of a genuine populist (Bernie Sanders), and, on the other hand, enable and encourage "gentrification," or an outrage like fracking, or an outrage like poisoning redwood forests. $15/hr won't mean very much when the planet goes down. It will mean nothing at all when our overlords bring in their next horror: the automation of all blue collar jobs, even service jobs. Meanwhile, the uber rich get uber richer, and virtually nobody among the leaders our once great Democratic Party gives a crap. They're all sheep following the corporate money.
The good news is that TWO MILLION people have become newly registered voters in California, most of them young, most of them registering Democratic. The young, who inherit our wounded Mother Earth, may have their say yet!
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**(Measure V, on the Mendocino County ballot will put a stop to this. The Gap owners are mailing out fancy brochures every other day, to try to convince people that poisoning Mendocino forests is okay. The trees that are being poisoned are native tanoaks, which spring up and heal the land after decades of clearcutting. Poisoning these trees is as bad as clearcutting, as to ecological crime. And it is a serious fire hazard.)
