Without using Google, can anyone tell these “liberal” presidential candidates’ words apart? Which one is your hero, Bernie? Who said what and more importantly: where has any of it gotten us?
“All of us know what those challenges are today — a war with no end, a dependence on oil that threatens our future, schools where too many children aren’t learning, and families struggling paycheck to paycheck despite working as hard as they can. We know the challenges. We’ve heard them. We’ve talked about them for years.”
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Dr. King understood this, many years ago when he said the war in Vietnam was destroying the people of two nations. We don’t have enough money to build bridges in this country, yet we blow them up in Iraq. We don’t have money to build schools in this country, but we have seen schools and hospitals and other institutions destroyed in Iraq. We cannot take care of matters here at home, and yet we have leaders who want to go all around the world and tell people what to do. Let’s come back home. Let’s take care of things here. Let’s have a country that we can be proud of, with housing for all and jobs for all and education for all and healthcare for all. That’s the kind of America that people will love; the kind of America that will be an example to people all over the world as a country that you believe in, a country that you want to see succeed. Are we ready to take the path towards that kind of an America?
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What’s the fundamental challenge of our day? It is to end economic violence. Most poor people are not lazy. They’re not black. They’re not brown. They’re mostly white, and female and young. Most poor people are not on welfare.
I know they work. I’m a witness. They catch the early bus. They work every day. They raise other people’s children. They work every day. They clean the streets. They work every day. They change the beds you slept in in these hotels last night and can’t get a union contract. They work every day.
They work in hospitals. I know they do. They wipe the bodies of those who are sick with fever and pain. They empty their bedpans. They clean out their commode. No job is beneath them, and yet when they get sick, they cannot lie in the bed they made up every day. America, that is not right. We are a better nation than that. We are a better nation than that.
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Today, we stand here and say loudly and clearly that; “Enough is enough. This great nation and its government belong to all of the people, and not to a handful of billionaires, their Super-PACs and their lobbyists.”
Brothers and sisters: Now is not the time for thinking small. Now is not the time for the same old – same old establishment politics and stale inside-the-beltway ideas.
Now is the time for millions of working families to come together, to revitalize American democracy, to end the collapse of the American middle class and to make certain that our children and grandchildren are able to enjoy a quality of life that brings them health, prosperity, security and joy – and that once again makes the United States the leader in the world in the fight for economic and social justice, for environmental sanity and for a world of peace.
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Our democratic system has been the object of a hostile takeover, engineered by a confederacy of corruption, careerism, and campaign consulting. And money has been the lubricant greasing the deal.
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For millions and millions of Americans, the dream with which I grew up has been shattered. The ideal that if you work hard and play by the rules you’ll be rewarded, you’ll do a little better next year than you did last year, your kids will do better than you. But that idea has been devastated for millions of Americans.
How did this happen? I would argue it happened for two reasons. No. 1: We lost our economic leadership. Other nations began to do some things better than we do, and their economies started growing faster and faster as ours slowed down. Big, Simple Ideas
No. 2, and this is why I’m running for President: We elected people to high office who had the wrong response to the problem. And that’s what this election is all about. Three or four big, simple ideas, even though the problems are complex.
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