Jake, let's be honest and understand that this coronavirus pandemic exposes the incredible weakness and dysfunctionality of our current health care s… - Bernie Sanders

The war on terror has come with huge opportunity costs as well—things we haven’t been able to do because we were mired in costly overseas conflicts. Competitors like China and Russia have exploited our forever wars to expand their economic and political influence around the world. In China, an inner circle led by President Xi Jinping has steadily consolidated power, clamping down on domestic political freedom while aggressively promoting its version of authoritarian capitalism abroad. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has a grandiose vision of restoring the power that Moscow commanded in the Soviet era, something he knows he cannot achieve. But what he can do, what he is trying to do, is to destroy the alliance of liberal democracies in Europe and North America that stand in the way of Russian resurgence.

One of the reasons for Brexit, for Trump’s victory in the United States, for the rise of ultra-nationalist rightwing candidates all over Europe, is the fact that the global economy has been very good for large multinational corporations, has in many ways been a positive thing for well-educated people, but there are many, many tens of millions of people in this country and all over the world who have been left behind by globalization. In this country, one of the facts that Trump pointed out in his speech that actually was a true fact is that in this country we have lost some 60,000 factories since the year 2000. Millions of decent-paying jobs in manufacturing have disappeared, some of that is due to automation, a lot has to do with disastrous trade policies which benefited the CEOs of large corporations at the expense of American workers. This is true in many parts of the world. Trump picked up support from people who felt that the elites, the economic elites, the political elites, forgot about them. And the truth is the economic and political elites did forget about them. We have seen in this country, not widely known in Europe, that inflation adjusted to wages for millions of workers today is lower than it was 40 years ago. So you have got millions of people today working two or three jobs, people who are working longer hours for lower wages, you’ve got half of older workers in America, 55 to 64, who have literally nothing in the bank as they face retirement. We have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major country on Earth. We have massive income inequality. So what’s happened in America and in many parts of the world is that globalization has done well for the folks who assemble at Davos, for the ruling economic elite of the world. In this country alone you have seen a tenfold increase in the number of billionaires.

One of the major, untold stories of our time is the rapid movement toward global oligarchy, in which just a handful of billionaires now own and control a significant part of the world economy. Here in the United States, the top one-tenth of 1% owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90%. Incredibly, according to a recent report from the Institute for Policy Studies, three of the richest people in America – Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett – now own more wealth than bottom 160 million people in our country. But this is clearly not just an American issue. It is a global issue. While millions of people throughout the world live in dire poverty, without clean drinking water, adequate health care, decent housing, or education for their kids, the six wealthiest people in the world as ranked by Forbes Magazine own more wealth, according to Oxfam, than the bottom half of the world’s population, 3.6 billion people. This massive level of wealth and income inequality, and the political power associated with that wealth, is an issue that cannot continue be ignored. We must fight back.