Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT)

"Plant Your Flag" +
8:36 video from Dec. 30, 2013.

Text: A Progressive Agenda: Economy, Health Care, Global Warming, Education, Election Reform

Sen. Sanders: I think the time is long overdue for the Congress to start addressing the very, very substantive issues that the American people are struggling with.

Text: Economy

Our economy is making a modest recovery but at the end of the day real unemployment is at 13-percent, youth unemployment is close to 20-percent, the gap between the very, very rich and everybody else is growing wider.  These are issues that are going to have to be dealt with.  So my own view is that we have to be extremely aggressive on the economy. 

What does that mean?  What it means is at a time when more and more of the new jobs being created are low wage jobs we have to raise the minimum wage to at least $10.10 an hour.  Second of all, unemployment remains much too high.  We need a major jobs program to create the millions of jobs that this country desperately needs, and among other ways to do it--and there are various ways to do it--but two good ways is number one to invest in our crumbling infrastructure, roads, bridges, rail system, wastewater, water plants, that's number one.  Number two, energy efficiency and that helps us create jobs making our buildings more efficient but it also helps us dealing with greenhouse gas emissions and the crisis of global warming. 

So creating jobs, raising the minimum wage, creating a tax system which is fair, which asks the wealthiest people and largest corporations to start paying their fair share of taxes are some of the issues that are on my mind that we have to deal with.

Text: Health Care

I think that people do not fully appreciate how dysfunctional and how wasteful the current health care system is.  I voted for the Affordable Care Act.  I think it is a modest step forward.  It will provide health insurance to many millions more Americans.  That's a good thing.  It ends this obscene practice of insurance companies denying people coverage because of pre-existing conditions.  I fought hard for a provision which is creating hundreds of community health centers all over this country, and they're doing a great job providing primary health care.  There are other good features to the Affordable Care Act. 

But at the end of the day we have got to ask ourselves some very simple questions. How does it happen that here in the United States we are spending almost twice as much per person on health care as the people of any other nation and yet our health care outcomes in many respects are not as good.

So to my mind what we have got to do is move forward toward a Medicare for all single-payer system--guarantees healthcare to all people as a right and it does it in a much more cost-effective way than the current dysfunctional system.

Text: Global Warming

It is an embarrassment not just to me but I think to every American that when the scientific community is telling us loudly and clearly that global warming is the major planetary crisis that we face, that right now because of global warming we're see increased drought, we're seeing flooding, we're seeing extreme weather disturbances which are costing us lives, which are costing us hundreds of billions of dollars in damage and which will only get worse in years to come if we do not very boldly address that crisis, the fact that we are not talking about that, that we are not moving forward is beyond my comprehension.  So we have got to continue the effort to push that, those ideas front and center.  Along with Senator Barbara Boxer I've introduced the most comprehensive global warming legislation ever introduced, which includes a tax on carbon.  We've got to invest in energy efficiency.  We've got to invest in wind, solar, geothermal and biomass.  We can transform our energy system.  We can create jobs doing that.  In many cases we can save money on our fuel bills, but this is an issue that not only the United States, China, Russia, India, the entire world has got to address.

Text: Education

Higher education right now is unaffordable to working class people and middle class people.  And the United States, as a democratic nation, is not going to have the kind of constituents that we need, the kind of population that we need, the kind of educated workforce that we need unless we make sure that higher education is available to all people regardless of their income.

One of the areas that concerns me very much is that in terms of student loan programs, kids are graduating now very deeply in debt.  The federal government is actually making money on student loans.  That's something we should not be doing.  So we want to revisit the whole issue of the funding of college education, we want to focus on how we can make college not only more affordable, but more relevant in today's economy

And the other area in terms of education that I think we want to focus on is pre-school.  In Vermont and all over America it is very hard, virtually impossible for a working family, an average family to find good quality, affordable pre-school education or child care.  And what happens then is you have a lot of low- and moderate-income kids who do not get the pre-school education they need.  They get into the first grade, they get into the second grade, they're already starting falling behind, you know by the time they're in high school they drop out of high school and some of them will get into all kinds of problems. 

So investing—every economist or many economists, every psychologist understands that what happens to little kids when they are very, very young has a huge impact on the rest of their lives.

Text: Election Reform

So if you're concerned about the economy, if you're concerned about health care, if you're concerned about education, if you're concerned about global warming, if you're concerned about women's rights, gay rights, anything else you have got to be concerned about the issue of campaign financing.  What we are seeing now is a real undermining, a very fundamental undermining of what American democracy is supposed to be about.

You know in the state of Vermont we have town meetings every March and it's one person, one vote.  People walk into their town hall, their community center and they sit around and they debate how much money they're going to spend on education, how much money they're going to spend on snowplows and municipal employee wages and so forth.

But here in Washington what we are seeing now is, as a result of Citizens United, disastrous Supreme Court decision, you're seeing a situation, it's getting worse every day, where big money interests, the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson and others are prepared to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to elect the candidates they want and to defeat the candidates they don't want.  And to allow corporate interests and millionaires to control the political process is to my mind an outrage, it is not what American democracy is supposed to be about. 

So what we're going to continue to work on and accelerate our efforts is to pass a constitutional amendment which overturns this Citizens United Supreme Court decision, and then we've got to move aggressively to public funding of elections.  Big money should not be the determinant about who gets elected in America; it should be your ideas.

Text: "Plant Your Flag"

I think you have a House of Representatives today that is dominated by right-wing extremists who want more tax breaks for the wealthiest people in this country and who are prepared to cut or eliminate virtually every important program passed in the last 80 years that protect working families and the middle class.  So I'm not here going to say that this is going to be an easy fight, but you've got to begin the process somewhere, you've got to plant your flag someplace.  And what we need to do is to have a series of ideas, we have to have some very specific legislation that the American people can rally around that begins to expose, I think, right-wing Republicans for what they are, and what they are are folks who are dependent upon billionaire dollars for their campaigns and people who in many ways are at war against the middle class and working class of this country. 

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