Bernie Sanders: Las Vegas highlights disparities that must be fixed

By Kyle Roerink

Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2015 | 4:25 p.m.

Bernie Sanders, the Democrat socialist presidential candidate whose populist rhetoric is driving grassroots support among the far left, was out of breath.

He had just given a speech to a room of union members — a demographic he is desperately trying to woo on his quest for the Democratic presidential nomination.

But it didn’t take long for Sanders, the 73-year-old Independent senator from Vermont, to regain his composure and detail how he would fix problems as president.

Sanders spoke today at the closed-door Nevada AFL-CIO Constitutional Convention and met with news reporters after the speech, waving his arms and raising his voice while addressing the nation’s income gap, income inequality, health care policy, immigration reform and the war on organized labor.

For Sanders, a drive through Las Vegas exemplifies much of what he’s trying to say on the campaign trail and energizes his underdog campaign that’s slowly been gaining recognition as a legitimate threat to Hillary Clinton’s frontrunner status.

“I did see people sleeping out on the streets here. We can do better than that,” he said.

In his push to raise awareness about the 45 million Americans in poverty, the 10 percent of residents who have the same amount of wealth as everyone else and the nearly $300 billion in tax breaks Congress has set aside for the wealthy, Sanders traveled to the AFL-CIO convention as a way to tie his message about unions with his greater philosophy on the U.S .economy.

Sanders’ trip to Nevada comes as he and Democratic presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Martin O’Malley meet this week with the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest federation of union members that often produce millions of votes and a powerful grassroots network for Democratic candidates.

Sanders said the AFL-CIO should take a hard look at his record and consider him its candidate of choice.

The group has yet to endorse a presidential candidate in the Democratic primary, and Sanders pointed out that its rating of his voting record is 98 percent during his two-decade career in Washington.

Clinton, the former secretary of state and party frontrunner, also gave a speech to the AFL-CIO today. She has yet to take a position on the Trans Pacific Partnerhsip, a controversial trade measure spearheaded by President Barack Obama and the GOP.

The AFL-CIO opposes the partnership, a 12-nation trade deal endorsed by the Obama administration to refine trade of agriculture, technology, medicine and other goods among Pacific Rim nations. The group says the deal would kill labor jobs in the U.S. and send them overseas.

Sanders is one of the deal’s loudest opponents, calling it a disaster and asking when Clinton would take a stand on the issue.

“At a time when we have lost millions of jobs because disastrous trade policies that have allowed corporations to shut down in America and move to China and other low-wage countries, it’s time for fundamental changes in our trade policies so that corporate America starts investing in this country and creating jobs in this country — not in countries abroad.”

Aside from labor, Sanders outlined a $1 trillion plan to rebuild the nation’s utility and transportation infrastructure. He also continued his push for a single-payer health care system.

While he declined to take a jab at his primary opponents, Sanders didn’t hesitate to swing at the GOP.

Republican candidates Donald Trump and Scott Walker have called for an end to citizenship for children who are born in the U.S. to undocumented parents.

“I strongly disagree,” he said. “What Republican candidates stand more for are tax breaks for billionaires.”