AOC tells massive crowd in Utah that working Americans are ‘more qualified’ than most in Congress

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tore into Congress for being out of touch with the American people and simply “unqualified” for the job at hand.

The Democratic congresswoman from New York spoke to a charged crowd of more than 20,000 people alongside Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders in Salt Lake City, Utah, Sunday as the pair rallied in several cities for their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour to protest Donald Trump’s administration and billionaires’ influence in politics.

Ocasio-Cortez attacked Utah’s Republican senators Mike Lee and John Curtis for voting to extend Trump’s 2017 tax cuts while proposing $1.5 trillion in cuts to federal spending.

AOC accused Republican lawmakers of buttressing the lives of billionaires at the expense of working class Americans.

“They know, Utah, that that’s not what you want,” she said. “They know that it is deeply unpopular. They know that it hurts working families from Utah, but they know that they are not there to serve the working class.”

“They are there to serve themselves and the billionaires who paid them,” she added.

She explained that behind the one-sided Republican agenda lies a dark blueprint for stoking “deep divisions along race, identity, and culture” — surmising that it was all part of a distraction policy.

“Donald Trump is not an aberration,” she said. “He is the logical, inevitable conclusion of an American political system dominated by corporate and dark money.”

She said it was necessary to defeat Trump by “defeating the system that created him.”

AOC also addressed her own experience growing up in a working class immigrant family during the 2008 financial crisis.

When her father died of cancer, AOC said worked as a waitress to support her mother with her late father’s healthcare bills and the economic repercussions at the time.

“Not a single one of them went to jail,” she said while speaking about the major players of the financial crisis who managed to avoid jail time despite taking excessive financial risks and subsequently plunging the world into a global recession.

Kareem Serageldin, formerly of Credit Suisse, was the only trader to be convicted. He was sentenced to two years and six months in prison in 2013.

“That is the story that Republicans tell — not mine, but all of ours — when they say a waitress or a working person is unqualified to serve in Congress,” she said. “But the truth is, many of us are far more qualified to understand what real life is actually like than any of them ever will.”

Ocasio-Cortez said her story has resonated with other working class Americans now grappling with the cost of living.

“We don’t have to live like this anymore, Utah. We can make a new world, a better country, where we can fight for the dignity of all people,” she said.

“And it looks like living wages, Utah, it looks like stable housing, Utah, it looks like guaranteed healthcare, Salt Lake City, and it looks like respect for all of our differences no matter who we are or where we come from.”

The New York congresswoman will appear alongside Sanders in Nampa, Idaho, Monday for the next leg of the tour, which promotes the political mantra of “Democracy over Oligarchy.”

They will then continue on to California and Montana.