This is one of the best summaries of what is happening in America I have heard in a long time. THIS in my opinion, is what the Democratic Party ought to be saying loudly and clearly, and in unison.
Cong. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) gave it on the floor of the House yesterday. I happened to catch it on C-Span, and he has posted it on his website.
It spells out the core issues facing us today, and lays out the progressive agenda in the clearest way possible.
The full speech covers much more territory than the excerpts below. It is definetly worth reading and circulating.
And if you feel it is worthwhile, please give this a :kick: to keep it alive for a day or two.
The speech (in PDF format) is at:
http://bernie.house.gov/documents/releases/20031022180012.asp-----------------------
For Immediate Release, 10/22/2003
Rep. Sanders Floor Statement: Congress and The White House Need New Priorities
Yesterday Representative Bernie Sanders (I-VT) delivered the following statement on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives to focus Congress and the White House on the needs of middle class Americans. Among the issues he discussed were the need for a new trade policy, a national healthcare system, and a media that discusses the concerns of average Americans rather than corporate America.
EXCERPT Below:
Mr. Speaker, the corporate media does not talk about it too much, and we do not discuss it terribly much here in the Congress, but the United States of America is rapidly on its way to becoming three separate nations: An increasingly wealthy elite, a small number of people who have incredible wealth and incredible power; a middle class, the vast majority of our people, which is shrinking, where the average person is working longer hours for lower wages; and, at the bottom we have a growing number of Americans who
are living in abject poverty, barely keeping their heads above water.
Mr. Speaker, there has always been a wealthy elite in this country, that is not new, and there has always been a gap between the rich and the poor. But the disparities in wealth and income that currently exist in this country have not been seen since the 1920s.
In other words, instead of becoming a more egalitarian country, with a stronger middleclass, we are becoming a Nation in which the rich have more wealth and power, the middle-class is shrinking, and poverty is growing. Mr. Speaker, today the wealthiest 1 percent own more wealth than the bottom 95 percent. One percent own more wealth than the bottom 95 percent. The CEOs of large corporations today earn more than 500 times what their employees are making. While workers are being squeezed, being forced to pay more for health insurance, while their
pensions are being cut back, the CEOs of large corporations make out like bandits.
Mr. Speaker, the Nation's 13,000 wealthiest families, which constitute one onehundredth of one percent of the population, receive almost as much income as the bottom 20 million families in the United States. One one-hundredth of one percent, more income
than the bottom 20 million families. That, to my mind, is not what America is supposed o be.
New data from the Congressional Budget Office shows that the gap between the rich and the poor in terms of income more than doubled from 1979 to 2000. In other words, we are moving in exactly the wrong direction. The gap is such that the wealthiest 1 percent had more money to spend after taxes than the bottom 40 percent. The richest 2.8 million Americans had $950 billion after taxes, or 15.5 percent of the economic pie, while the poorest 110 million had less, 14.4 percent of all after-tax income. Once again,
that is not what America is supposed to be. While the rich get richer and receive huge tax breaks from the White House, the middle-class is struggling desperately, in my State of Vermont and all over this country.
It is increasingly common to see people work at not one job, but two jobs, and occasionally three jobs. When I was growing up, the expectation for the middle-class was that one worker in a family could work 40 hours a week and earn enough income to pay
the bills. Well, in the State of Vermont, and all over this country, it is becoming increasingly uncommon when that happens. Much more often than not, wives are forced to work alongside husbands in order to bring in the necessary income, and kids, in many instances, do not get the care that they need.
Unemployment in our country is now at a 9-year high. We are over 6 percent, and there are now over 9 million people who are unemployed. But in truth the real number is higher than that, because there are a lot of people who are working part-time because they cannot find full-time jobs, and there are a lot of people who are not part of the statistics because they have given up and are not actively seeking employment.
Mr. Speaker, of the 3.3 million private sector jobs that have been lost over the last 3 years, 2.7 million were in the manufacturing sector. This is an issue I want to spend a moment on, because what is happening in manufacturing today is a disaster for this
country and bodes very poorly for the future of our Nation.
Mr. Speaker, the bottom line is, and this Congress must finally recognize it, our trade policies are failing. Permanent, normal trade relations with China has been a disaster. NAFTA has been a disaster. Our membership in the World Trade Organization has not
worked for the middle-class and working families, for this country, and the time is long overdue for the United States Congress to stand up to corporate America, to stand up to the President of the United States, to stand up to all of the editorial pages all over
America who have told us year after year after year how great unfettered free trade would be.
They were wrong. Their policies have led to enormous economic problems for the middle-class in this country. The decline of manufacturing is one of the reasons why our middle-class is
shrinking and why wages for middle-class workers are in decline.
Many people understand the pain involved when we have lost 3 million jobs in the last few years. But we also have got to point out that our trade policies and our overall economic policies have been a disaster for the wages that American workers receive. Today, American workers in the private sector are earning 8 percent less than they were in 1973. Now, just think for a moment. Think for a moment. In the last 30 years, there has been a revolution in technology. We all know that. We all know what computers have
done, what e-mail has done, what faxes have done. We know what robotics in factories have done. In other words, we are a much more productive Nation than we used to be. Every worker is producing more.
Given that reality, why is it that the average worker in the private sector today is earning 8 percent less? That is an issue we have to put right up there on the radar screen, and we need to debate.
Mr. Speaker, manufacturing in this country is currently in a state of collapse. Let us be honest about it. In the last 3 years, we have lost 2.7 million manufacturing jobs, which comprise 16 percent of the total. That is right. You heard that right. In the last 3 years, we have lost 16 percent of our manufacturing jobs. At 14.7 million, we are at the lowest number of factory jobs since 1958.
In my own State of Vermont, my small State of Vermont, we have lost some 8,700 manufacturing jobs between January 2001 and August 2003, and the pity of that is that in Vermont, manufacturing jobs pay workers middle-class wages. In Vermont, on average, a
worker working in manufacturing makes over $42,000 a year. That is a decent wage. We are losing those jobs, and the new jobs that we are creating are paying only a fraction of what manufacturing jobs are paying, and almost always provide much, much weaker
benefits.
Mr. Speaker, in 2002 the United States had a $435 billion trade deficit, a $435 billion trade deficit. This year, the trade deficit with China alone, one country, China, is expected to be $120 billion, and that number is projected to increase in future years. It
has gone up and up and up. The National Association of Manufacturers estimates that if present trends continue, our trade deficit with China will grow to $330 billion in 5 years.
But our disastrous trade policy is not only costing us millions of decent paying jobs; it is squeezing wages. It is squeezing wages. Because many employers are saying if you do not take the cuts in health care, if you do not take the cuts in wages, we are going to move to China, we are going to move to Mexico.
One of the areas where people are being most severely hurt is among young workers without a college education. For entry-level workers without a college level education, the real wages that they have received, that they are now receiving, have dropped by over
20 percent in the last 25 years. And the answer and the reason for that is quite obvious. 25 years ago, 30 years ago if somebody did not go to college, as most people did not, what they would be able to do is go out and get a job in manufacturing. And millions and
millions of workers did that. And with those wages and those benefits they were able to lead a middle-class existence and raise their kids with a decent standard of living.
But the reality now is that the new jobs that are being created, the jobs at McDonald's and the jobs in Wal-Mart are not paying people a living wage.
What is happening to our economy today is best illustrated by the fact that some 20 years ago our largest employer was General Motors. And workers in General Motors earned, and still earn today, a living wage. Today, Mr. Speaker, our largest private employer is Wal-Mart. And that is what has happened to the American economy. We
have gone from a General Motors economy where workers earned decent wages and decent benefits to a Wal-Mart economy where people earn low wages and poor benefits. Today Wal-Mart employees earn $8.23 per hour or $13,861 annually. And that, Mr. Speaker, is an income which is below the poverty level.
And that is what the transformation of the American economy is about, an economy where workers used to work, produced real products, made middle-class wages, had good benefits, to a Wal-Mart economy where our largest employer now pays workers poverty
wages, minimal benefits, huge turn-over.
<snip>
Mr. Speaker, I have talked a moment about what is going on with the middle class. I have talked a little bit about the conversion from a manufacturing society, a General Motors society, to a service industry economy, a Wal-Mart economy, but let us look for a
moment at the people who are not even in the middle class. People who have not made it into the middle class. People who are at the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder in our country, the 34.8 million people in America who live in poverty. Sadly, Mr. Speaker,
while the rich get richer, 1.3 million more Americans became poor and entered poverty, the group of poor people in America.
In the midst of those people, Mr. Speaker, we have got to ask about the 11 million Americans who are trying to survive on the pathetic minimum wage of $5.15 an hour which exists here, and I think it is morally repugnant that this Congress voted to provide
huge tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, but somehow the President of the United States and the Republican leadership, not for one moment have thought about raising the minimum wage, which today is at a pathetic $5.15 cents an hour. How do people earning those wages survive? And I will tell you how some of them do it. After working 40 hours a week, they live in their automobiles because they cannot afford housing units in order to survive. They just cannot afford the housing because their
wages cannot pay the rent. And what, Mr. Speaker, about the 43.6 million Americans who lack any health insurance? That is 15.2 percent of our population. What about the 3.5 million people who will experience homelessness in this year, 1.3 million of them
children? What about our elderly citizens who cannot afford the outrageously high cost of prescription drugs? And the many of them who cut their pills in half or do not even bother trying to fill the prescriptions that their doctors write for them? What about those
people? What about the veterans who have put their lives on the line defending this country and then try to get into a VA hospital but find out that they are on a waiting list?
Mr. Speaker, one of the clear crises being faced by the American middle class is the crisis in health care and the cost of prescription drugs. In the last several years, we have
seen huge increases in health insurance and with the increase of unemployment, we have seen more and more working people lose their health insurance. In terms of losing health insurance, people then are open to bankruptcy, because if they end up with an accident or
a serious illness, they go to the hospital, but they are unable to pay those bills. And the highest amount of people who are bankrupt are the people who cannot pay their health
expenses that have been generated as a result of an accident or illness.
<snip>
Now, when we talk about the achievements of the Bush administration, and we understand that our deficit is now at an all-time high, that our national debt is going higher, that in the midst of all of this, our conservative friends who year after year told us how terrible deficits were and what kind of terrible obligations we were leaving to our kids and our grandchildren, well, these are the folks that are driving up the deficit, and they are driving up the national debt. Now, why are they doing that? Why are
conservatives doing that?
Well, I think there are two reasons. Number one, obviously, the tax breaks for the rich
are not hard to understand. Here in Washington, D.C. there are fund-raising dinners in which individuals have contributed $25,000 a plate, large corporations and their executives make huge contributions and that is payback time. Nothing new. The rich
make contributions. They get paid back in tax breaks. They get paid back in corporate welfare. They get paid back with their trade policy which makes it easier for them to throw American workers out on the street and move out to China. That we can understand. That is obscene, but easily understood.
But, Mr. Speaker, let me suggest to you that there is another even more cynical reason for driving up this deficit and driving up the national debt. And I believe that that reason
is that as the debt and the deficit become higher and higher, this President, or any other President, may be forced to come before the American people and say our deficit and our debt is so very high that we have no choice but to privatize Social Security, privatize
Medicare, privatize Medicaid, privatize public education.
We have got to do it. We have a huge deficit.
Oh, yeah, we did give hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks to the rich; but nonetheless, the deficit is so high that we are going to have to do away with all of the benefits, all of the guarantees that the American people have fought for over the last 100 years; and it is my belief that this administration really does want to take us back to the 19th century, where working people and the middle class had no protections whatsoever, where workers and poor people were dependent upon the largess of the wealthy for charity, but there were no guarantees. Social Security has its problems; and in my view, Social Security must be strengthened. Seniors must be receiving larger COLAs, but the solution to the problems that we may have are not to privatize Social Security and bring us back to the 1920s when elderly
people were the poorest segment of our society; but that is the direction that these folks are moving us towards, and they are moving us toward the privatization of Medicare.
Think about how many private insurance companies are really going to provide insurance for elderly, low-income sick people. The function of an insurance company is to make money, not to provide health care; and if a person is old and sick and poor, who is going to insure them? They are on their own.
<snip>
Mr. Speaker, on another area that is of enormous importance to the American people and more and more Americans are getting involved in it, the Bush administration is moving in precisely the wrong direction in terms of media consolidation. In my view, one
of the crises that we face in our country today is fewer and fewer large media conglomerates own and control what we see, what we hear, and what we read.
I know the average person says, well, man, I have got 100 channels on my cable. Check out who owns those 100 channels. Check out who owns NBC, which is General Electric; who owns CBS, which is Viacomm; who owns ABC, which is Disney; who owns Fox Television, which is Rupert Murdoch, an extreme right-wing billionaire. What we are
seeing in terms of media is fewer and fewer large corporations controlling the flow of information in America. Clear Channel Radio now owns 1,200 radio stations all over this
country.
In America, what our freedom is about is debating different points of view. No one has all the right answers, but we cannot flourish as a democracy unless we hear different points of view; and that is becoming harder and harder to achieve, as fewer and fewer
companies own what we see, hear, and read.
Instead of acknowledging that problem and moving us to a more diversified media, where we will have local media reporting on local issues, where it will be different points of view being heard, where there will be more diversity in our media, the Bush
administration is moving in exactly the wrong direction.
<snip>
So, Mr. Speaker, let me conclude by stating that it is high time that the Congress of the United States begin to focus on the needs of the middle class, the vast majority of our people, the middle class of which is shrinking, the middle class in which the average
person is working longer hours and for lower wages. America will grow when the middle class grows; and to do that, we need some fundamental changes in our policies.
We need a national health care system which guarantees health care to all Americans. We need to raise the minimum wage to a living wage. We need to fundamentally change our trade policies so that we do not continue to see the collapse of manufacturing. We
need to make sure that every American, regardless of income, has a right to go to college. We need to rescind the tax breaks that have been given to the wealthiest people and the largest corporations and create a tax structure which works for the middle class and not
just for the wealthy and the powerful.
There is a lot of work that must be done, and I look forward to participating in that
effort.
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