‘A Government And An Economy That Works For All Of Us’: Bernie Sanders Touts ‘A New America’

At a "Fight Oligarchy" event in Folsom on Tuesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) spoke about reforming the economy.

Transcript

00:00Brothers and sisters, our job is not just right now to defeat the very dangerous situation inherent in Trumpism.

00:16We've got to fight them every single day.

00:19But we have got to do more than that.

00:26We have got to create a vision of what a new America is about.

00:35Where we have a government and an economy that works for all of us, not just a few.

00:51This is the wealthiest country in the history of the world.

00:56We should not have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major country on earth.

01:06Zero through four are the most important years of human development.

01:12We should have the best child care system in the world, not a dysfunctional system.

01:21We should have the strongest public education system on earth.

01:30Do we have any teachers here?

01:34Thank you, teachers!

01:39And we want to make sure that our teachers are well paid and are respected.

01:49No teacher in America should start off at less than $60,000 a year.

02:02Unlike Trump, we understand the importance of education.

02:08Learning and growing intellectually is part of what being human is about.

02:17And in a competitive global economy, we need the best educated workforce in the world.

02:23We need more doctors, we need more nurses, we need more dentists, we need more electricians, plumbers, sheet metal workers.

02:44Some people should not have to go deeply in debt to get the education they need.

02:56You know, back in 1944, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, one of the great presidents in our history,

03:05he said something that was enormously profound.

03:09It kind of got passed over because we're in the middle of World War II.

03:13But what he said at that point, he said,

03:15Look, we have a great constitution, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, etc.

03:20But we're lacking something.

03:22And what we're lacking is the understanding that economic rights are human rights.

03:29Now the establishment, the establishment doesn't want us to understand what that means.

03:41But what it means is that living in this country, the richest country on earth,

03:46a country where today we're seeing an explosion of technology, which is going to make us even wealthier.

03:53What we want is that technology to work for working people, not just the owners of the corporations.

04:07Brothers and sisters, it is not a radical idea. It really isn't.

04:12You know, the establishment and the money and interest will tell you, oh, this is a terrible idea.

04:17But in this country, every man, woman and child can and should have a decent standard of living.

04:30We should not have. What a disgrace.

04:33In L.A., here in Burlington, Vermont, we got together as a nation,

04:38800,000 people sleeping out on the streets of America.

04:42We've got 20 million people who are spending half of their limited incomes on housing.

04:55Maybe instead of spending a trillion dollars a year on the military,

04:59what about building five million units of low-income and affordable housing?