Bernie Sanders showed no signs of “toning down” his rhetoric Saturday, speaking to Maryland voters at the Royal Farms Arena in Baltimore about the state of the U.S. economy in 2016.
Sanders said that poverty in the worst areas of Baltimore rivaled conditions in “The West Bank in Palestine,” “North Korea,” and “distressed cities in Nigeria, India, China, and South Africa.”
“Poverty in Baltimore, and around this country, is a death sentence,” Sanders said.
“People don’t know this,” he explained. “If you are born in Baltimore’s poorest neighborhoods, your life expectancy is almost twenty years shorter than if you are born in a wealthier neighborhood.”
“Fifteen neighborhoods in Baltimore have lower life expectancies than North Korea,” he continued, drawing shocked boos from the crowd.
“Two [neighborhoods] have a higher infant mortality rate than the West Bank in Palestine… Baltimore teenagers between the ages of fifteen and nineteen face poorer health conditions and a worse economic outlook than those in distressed cities in Nigeria, India, China and South Africa.”
“We are talking about the United States of America in the year 2016 — a country in which the top one tenth of one percent now owns almost as much wealth as the bottom ninety percent.”
“In this country we going to make profound economic changes,” he said. “The people on top will not continue to accumulate billions of dollars in personal wealth while children in Baltimore and inner cities in this country go hungry, and have inadequate healthcare and education.”