By George Bao Sept. 3, 2016
LOS ANGELES – How a socialist U.S. presidential candidate sees the problems facing the country and what is the solution?
Gloria La Riva, who claimed herself as the only Latina, the only person of color, the only worker and the only socialist among the five U.S. presidential candidates in California, is the U.S. presidential candidate for the Peace and Freedom Party.
The other four candidates are Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party, Donald Trump for the GOP, Gary Johnson for the Libertarian and Jill Stein for the Green Party.
“In Central California the workers suffer from poverty, racism and the water crisis while the rich just get richer,” said Gloria La Riva before her trip to Central California this weekend.
“The hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers who are the backbone of the massive agricultural industry Central California have faced oppression and state neglect for a long time,” she said.
“I particularly denounce the extremely racist and dangerous speech that Trump gave Thursday night in Arizona against Latino immigrants. How dare he threaten the workers who are an integral part of the U.S. working class! We stand 100 percent with the immigrant population,” she stressed.
La Riva was the founder of the Farmworkers Emergency Relief Committee in 1991, following the disastrous citrus freeze that left over 100,000 farmworkers with no income. The committee provided emergency relief for months to thousands of families in Orange Cove and nearby area. The most important accomplishment of the FERC and La Riva was to mobilize public support and force FEMA to open offices in the region and assist the affected families.
“Recently we led a delegation of activists to learn more about the water crisis in East Porterville, where more than twelve thousand people went without running water for more than half a year. The lion’s share of water in the state is used to generate profit for agribusiness, with no regard for the population that needs water for survival,” said La Vira.
“There is a clear pattern in California. Corporations reap mega profits while poor and oppressed people do the work. Corporations pollute and destroy the land leaving it unlivable for the people, and the government turns a blind eye. This pattern is particularly daunting considering that climatologists examining corporate water usage and carbon emissions predict the expansion of a mega drought across the region,” she said.
“Our presidential campaign says ‘seize the profits to save the planet.’ Under socialism the people would determine what is really necessary in terms of crops to grow and to properly conserve water, in short, to create a sustainable agriculture,” said La Vira.
“Our ten-point program also calls for an immediate end to all deportations and full legal status to all immigrant people, an end to police brutality with the offending cops to be put in jail, and full federal equality for all LGBTQ people,” she said.
However, La Vira failed to put forward specific solutions to the problems she has listed.