Bernie Sanders Quotes

What happens in Congress in the next few months will determine the future of our country – and our planet. In this pivotal moment in American history, Democrats in the US House of Representatives and US Senate, working with the White House, have proposed several pieces of legislation which can strengthen working families, protect the planet and save American democracy from right-wing extremism. We can create millions of good paying union jobs rebuilding our crumbling roads, bridges, water systems and constructing the millions of units of affordable housing we desperately need. We can also end starvation wages in America by raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. At a time when real wages for American workers have been stagnant for decades, these actions will be a major step forward in improving the standard of living of a declining middle class.

Our economic debates should not revolve around questions of resources. They should revolve around questions of intent, and will. If we truly intend to make America great, we will strive to be a nation that has eliminated poverty, homelessness, and diseases of despair, where hard work is rewarded with a living wage, and where those who are too old or too infirm to work are protected by a safety net that guarantees no American will be destitute. That's not all plan vision or some foreign construct. This country should have the best educational system in the world from childcare to graduate school- accessible to all, regardless of income. We should have a top-qualiy healthcare system allowing all people to walk into a doctor's office and get the care they need without worrying about the cost because the system is publicly funded. Instead of spending more money on the military than the next ten nations combined, we should lead the world in diplomacy and international collaboration, especially when it comes to preventing wars and combating climate change.

The United States invaded Afghanistan in response to the worst terrorist attack in our country’s history, and with a specific purpose: to bring justice to those who planned the 9/11 attacks and those who supported them, and to make sure that such an attack would never happen again. Our military has now been in Afghanistan for nearly 18 years. Instead of staying focused on those who attacked us, President George W. Bush’s administration chose to declare a global “war on terror” in order justify its 2003 invasion of Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. The war on terror has turned into an endless war. We will soon have troops fighting in Afghanistan who were not even born on September 11, 2001. We have fathers who completed tours of duty there, only to be followed by their sons and daughters. Withdrawing from Afghanistan is something we must do. My administration will not make critical foreign-policy decisions like this one via tweet, as our current president does. We will work closely with our partners and allies to design a serious diplomatic and political strategy to stabilize the region, promote more effective and accountable governance, and ensure that threats do not re-emerge after we leave.

In my view, there is no justice when low income and working class mothers are forced to separate from their babies one or two weeks after birth and go back to work because they need the money that their jobs provide. Now I know everybody here -- we all are, maybe in different ways, but all of us believe in family values.

What media loves is to focus on the candidates. What the American people, I believe, want is for us to focus on them, not the candidates, not anymore.

The good news is that the House and an overwhelming majority of the Senate Democratic Caucus – as many as 48 out of 50 members – are prepared to pass strong and popular legislation that addresses the long-neglected needs of the working class. At a time when the top 1% is doing phenomenally well, we are ready to reform our regressive tax system and demand that the very rich and large corporations pay their fair share of taxes. We want to take on the greed of the pharmaceutical industry and substantially lower prescription drug prices, expand Medicare to cover hearing, dental and vision, address the crisis of childhood poverty and a dysfunctional child care system, improve the quality of home health care, build the affordable housing we desperately need and create millions of good jobs by combating the existential threat of climate change. The bad news is that two members of the Senate Democratic Caucus, Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have withheld their support. For six months, President Biden and many of us have engaged in endless negotiations with these senators. These never-ending conversations, which have gone nowhere, must end. The time for voting must begin.

[A]nyone who wants to talk about foreign policy or, for that matter, anything that goes on in Congress, without recognizing the corrupt political system that we have and the impact that money has over what we do, really doesn't know very much about what's going on.

That is an excellent question. And the answer is, as I think many people certainly in this country understand, is that what we have seen over the last 30 or 40 years is a Democratic party that has transformed itself from a party of the working class – white workers, black workers, immigrant workers – to a party significantly controlled by a liberal elite which has moved very far away from the needs of the middle class and working families of this country. So if you were to go out on the street today in any place in this country and ask working people whether they think the Democratic party is the party of the American working class, very few would say yes. If you did that in the 1930s under Franklin Delano Roosevelt they would say yes, there was a clear distinction. Let’s not forget it was a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, who deregulated Wall Street; a Democratic president, Clinton, who pushed for Nafta; a Democratic president, Barack Obama, who pushed as hard as he could for the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Now in my view Clinton did some very good things, in my view Obama did a lot of good things, but that is the reality and it is within that context that a space developed for a total phoney like Donald trump who by the way manufactures many of his products abroad in China, in Mexico and Turkey in low-wage shops to come in and pose as a defender of American workers.

As a presidential candidate and, more recently, as the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, I've supported the struggles of working Americans in tough times and fought to give them a greater say in controlling their destiny. And frankly, I am frustrated by politicians who talk a good line about workers' rights on the campaign trail but then fail to deliver when they acquire power. That's bad policy, and bad politics. Democrats made an enormous and far-reaching mistake in the 1990s when President Bill Clinton aligned with Wall Street to approve so-called free-trade pacts, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Workers felt betrayed, and it cost the party dearly in the disastrous midterm elections of 1994, when control of the House and Senate shifted to right-wing Republicans who cynically exploited the opening Clinton had given them. Workers understood that you couldn't be both pro-Wall Street and pro-worker. For many working-class Americans, Clinton's choice to side with Wall Street was the end of their allegiance to the Democratic Party, a trend which has only grown over the years. Democrats should have learned their lesson. But there is very little evidence that this has happened. Too many of them still do not understand that the policies of a party that is supposed to stand for workers must actually do so when in power.

Terrorism is a very real threat, which requires robust diplomatic efforts, intelligence cooperation with allies and partners, and yes, sometimes military action. But as an organizing framework, the global war on terror has been a disaster for our country. Orienting U.S. national-security strategy around terrorism essentially allowed a few thousand violent extremists to dictate the foreign policy of the most powerful nation on earth. We responded to terrorists by giving them exactly what they wanted. The war on terror has also been staggeringly wasteful. According to the most recent study by the Costs of War Project at Brown University, it will have cost American taxpayers more than $4.9 trillion through the end of this fiscal year. Factoring in the future health-care costs of veterans injured in post-9/11 wars, the bill will be closer to $6 trillion. And even after this enormous expense, the world has more terrorists now, not fewer. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, there were nearly four times as many Sunni Islamic militants operating around the world in November 2018 as on September 11, 2001. That is no coincidence: the way the United States and its partners have prosecuted this war has caused widespread resentment and anger, which helps those terrorists recruit.

Well, the Ebola crisis is one thing. This is, obviously, a pandemic, which is far more severe and impactful to this country. And I think one of the things that we want to remember here is that we got a lot of elderly people in this country who are told stay home, don't leave your house. Who's going to get food to them? How do we get food to them? You got schools all over this country now being shut down. OK? How are we going to make sure that the kids do well in this crisis, not become traumatized? What do we do about the parents now who have to stay home with kids and can't go to work? So I think what -- bottom line here is that, in this crisis, we have got to start paying attention to the most vulnerable. That includes people who are in prison right now, people who are in homeless shelters right now. What about the half-a-million people who are homeless tonight? Who's going to respond to them? Now, in 2008, when we had the Wall Street bailout, they did very well for the people on top. They bailed out the crooks on Wall Street. They forgot about the suffering of ordinary Americans. This time around, let us learn that lesson. Let us pay attention to the working families of this country and to the most vulnerable.

The real issue here, if you look at the Koch Brothers' agenda, is: look at what many of the extreme right-wing people believe. Obamacare is just the tip of the iceberg. These people want to abolish the concept of the minimum wage, they want to privatize the Veteran's Administration, they want to privatize Social Security, end Medicare as we know it, massive cuts in Medicaid, wipe out the EPA, you don’t have an Environmental Protection Agency anymore, Department of Energy gone, Department of Education gone. That is the agenda. And many people don’t understand that the Koch Brothers have poured hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars into the tea party and two other kinds of ancillary organizations to push this agenda.

Nine months ago, our campaign began. And when it began, we had no political organization, no money, and not much name recognition outside of the state of Vermont. A lot has happened in nine months. And what has happened is, I think, the American people have responded to a series of basic truths, and that is that we have today a campaign finance system which is corrupt, which is undermining American democracy, which allows Wall Street and billionaires to pour huge sums of money into the political process to elect the candidates of their choice. And aligned with a corrupt campaign finance system is a rigged economy. And that's an economy where ordinary Americans are working longer hours for low wagers. They are worried to death about the future of their kids. And yet they are seeing almost all new income and all new wealth going to the top 1 percent. And then in addition to that, the American people are looking around and they see a broken criminal justice system. They see more people in jail in the United States of America than any other country on earth, 2.2 million. We're spending $80 billion a year locking up fellow Americans.

It is ludicrous to believe that at the same meeting where Elizabeth Warren told me she was going to run for president, I would tell her that a woman couldn't win. It's sad that, three weeks before the Iowa caucus and a year after that private conversation, staff who weren't in the room are lying about what happened. What I did say that night was that Donald Trump is a sexist, a racist and a liar who would weaponize whatever he could. Do I believe a woman can win in 2020? Of course! After all, Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by 3 million votes in 2016.

At a moment in history when the leadership of the Republican party is undermining democracy, ignoring the climate crisis, trying to overturn Roe v Wade, opposing a minimum wage increase, embracing more tax breaks for the rich and the growth of oligarchy, and stopping us from passing serious gun safety legislation, it would be a disaster for this rightwing extremist party to gain control of the US House and US Senate. Unfortunately, it appears that the current strategy of the Democratic party is allowing that to happen. According to numerous polls, the Republicans stand an excellent chance of winning this coming November. The main reason: while the Democratic party has, over the years, been hemorrhaging support from the white working class, it is now losing support from Latino, Black and Asian workers as well. Further, in terms of the 2022 elections, the enthusiasm level within the Democratic base is extremely low. It is not only working-class support that is fading away but it is also that young people, who helped elect Biden and other Democrats in 2020, are becoming increasingly demoralized and are not likely to vote in large numbers in this coming election.