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by Bernie Sanders
How do we build a political movement in this country that represents all of the people and not a handful of millionaires?
The middle class is collapsing, the people on top are making out like bandits, and the poorest people are struggling just to keep their heads above water.
Today, the concentration of wealth and income in this country is not only greater than at any time since the 1920s, but it is far greater than in any other major country on Earth.
It is not acceptable that the wealthiest 1 percent of the population owns more wealth than the bottom 95 percent.
That's not America.
It is not acceptable that the 13,000 wealthiest families in this country earn more income than the bottom twenty million families.
It is not acceptable that the greed of corporate America has resulted in the CEOs of large corporations earning over 500 times what their average worker makes.
That's not America, and we're going to change that.
Today, the largest employer in America is not General Motors. It is Wal-Mart, which pays people subsistence wages and minimal benefits. It is now being sued by workers in twenty-eight states because the company is not even paying the overtime it should be paying.
But it's not just Wal-Mart. It is the transformation of the American economy that Congress is not talking about, that the President certainly is not talking about, and that the media is not talking about.
In the last three years alone, we have lost over two-and-a-half-million manufacturing jobs that were paying people decent middle class wages. And when you talk about patriotism, and when you talk about the American flag, what is corporate America doing by throwing American workers out on the street, moving to China, moving to countries where people can't even form a union or stand up for their rights? Let's talk about patriotism. Let's talk about investing in America and expanding the middle class.
Corporate America essentially is saying the hell with the American worker, the hell with the United States of America. We will do anything we want in order to make more and more profits.
And my friends, it is not only manufacturing jobs that are going abroad. If some of you say, "Well, I went to college, man, I know how to work that computer. I have a good job," think twice. They're after your jobs, as well. If there's a computer or a telephone job, it could be done any place in the world at a fraction of the wages that are paid in America. And that's where corporate America is moving.
We want the people in China, in India, all over the world, to do well, but we want a globalization that does not lead to a race to the bottom but uplifts all of the people of the world.
Now when we talk about what's happening in the middle class today, hear this. A hundred years ago, workers all over this country held huge demonstrations, and they had big banners that said, "Give us a forty-hour week. We're not animals. We're not beasts of burden. We want to spend time with our families. We want to get more education. We want some vacation time."
Now how many of you know that today the American worker is working longer hours by far than the people in any other industrialized country? Today, 40 percent of American workers are working fifty hours a week or more. That's the collapse of the middle class, and we have got to turn that around.
The scandal of our time is that with all the explosion of technology and productivity the average American is not working fewer hours and making more money. We are not down to a thirty-hour week. The middle class is not expanding, and poverty has not been eliminated. On the contrary, it has increased.
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