Bernie Sanders Capitalism Quotes

Both political parties have moved to the right during the neoliberal period. Today’s New Democrats are pretty much what used to be called “moderate Republicans.” The “political revolution” that Bernie Sanders called for, rightly, would not have greatly surprised Dwight Eisenhower. The fate of the minimum wage illustrates what has been happening. Through the periods of high and egalitarian growth in the ‘50s and ‘60s, the minimum wage—which sets a floor for other wages—tracked productivity. That ended with the onset of neoliberal doctrine. Since then, the minimum wage has stagnated (in real value). Had it continued as before, it would probably be close to $20 per hour. Today, it is considered a political revolution to raise it to $15.

Indentured servitude is banned, but what about students seeking to sell shares of their future earnings in exchange for money up front to pay for their college tuitions?

Jesus was a socialist.

The very existence of a rapidly expanding billionaire class in the United States is a manifestation of an unjust system that promotes massive income and wealth inequality.

If a nation is morally judged by how we treat the weakest and most vulnerable among us, our health care system fails miserably.

Is it really too much, in the twenty-first century, in the wealthiest country on earth, to begin creating an economy in which people actually have some power over what they do for forty hours or more a week?

In this unprecedented moment in American history, there is no more time for tinkering around the edges. It is time to reject “conventional wisdom” and “incrementalism.” It is time to fundamentally rethink our adherence to the system of unfettered capitalism, and to address the unspeakable harm that system is doing to us all.

What is the goal of the system? Should an entire layer of corporate bureaucracy called “insurance companies”—which employ hundreds of thousands of people who have absolutely nothing to do with the actual provision of health care—be allowed to continue determining policies and priorities with the sole purpose of maximizing profits?

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.

Capitalism forgets that life is social. And the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism, but in a higher synthesis.

Suddenly, it was dawning on Americans that health care should not be an employee benefit. It should be understood as a human right.

As circumstances grew increasingly desperate for the Democrats, I proposed a “radical idea.” I wanted “the world’s greatest deliberative body” to actually start deliberating. I wanted Senate Democrats to bring to the floor legislation that addressed the needs of working families, and force Republicans to vote for or against these very important and very popular initiatives.

The simple truth is that unfettered capitalism is not just creating economic misery for the majority of Americans, it is destroying our health, our well-being, our democracy, and our planet.

The only way to get it is by breaking the shackles of the old thinking that says there is no alternative to unfettered capitalism. We’ve got to upend the lie we’ve been told for decades, the one that says: This is how the system works. This is how globalization works. This is how capitalism works. This is how employers and employees will always relate to each other. There’s nothing you can do about it. So just shut up and get back to work.

The American people were sick and tired of endless “negotiations.” They were sick and tired of politicians hiding behind closed doors. They wanted the Senate to vote on legislation to improve their lives. At the very least, they had a right to know where their senators stood on the issues. But Senate leaders preferred to do nothing rather than “divide” their caucus by exposing the pro-corporate stances of a handful of their Democratic colleagues.

The federal minimum wage had not been raised since 2009. Even worse, the $2.13 an hour tipped minimum wage for waiters, waitresses, bartenders, barbers, and hairstylists had not been raised since 1991—my first year in Congress.

in Norway, no matter how much time you might spend in a hospital, no matter how many doctor visits you might make, no matter how many prescription drugs you might use, you cannot spend more than $350 a year for health care. Not one cent more.

It is my strong belief that in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, with exploding technological progress that will greatly increase worker productivity, we can finally end austerity economics and achieve the long-sought human dream of providing a decent standard of living for all. In the twenty-first century we can end the vicious dog-eat-dog economy in which the vast majority struggle to survive, while a handful of billionaires have more wealth than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes.

Here is the simple, straightforward reality: The uber-capitalist economic system that has taken hold in the United States in recent years, propelled by uncontrollable greed and contempt for human decency, is not merely unjust. It is grossly immoral. We need to confront that immorality. Boldly. Bluntly. Without apology. It is only then that we can begin to transform a system that is rigged against the vast majority of Americans and is destroying millions of lives. Confronting that reality and mobilizing people to bring about the transformational change we need is not easy. That’s why I’ve written this book. We need not only to understand the powerful forces that hold us down today but, equally important, to have a vision as to where we want to be in the future.

At the heart of the crisis is the reality that we really do not have a health care system—like most modern industrialized countries do. What we have is a non-system that is enormously complex, bureaucratic, and fragmented. It leaves parents bewildered and caregivers frustrated.

In other words, we have a major American (and global) industry whose business model is designed to attract young people to their products, chemically addict them, cause them terrible suffering and death, and then pass the hundreds of billions a year in medical costs on to the taxpayers.

Our struggle is to end a system that evaluates “worth” as a measure of market profitability, a system in which we are asked to believe—based on salaries paid—that the star athlete who helps a billionaire team owner increase his bottom line is “worth” more than a thousand teachers who help children escape poverty.

My answer to all these questions is that Americans are not nearly so free as we think we are, or as we should be. To achieve the genuine freedom to which we are entitled as human beings, we cannot be satisfied with political democracy alone—especially at a time when democracy itself is under fierce attack. We need economic democracy every bit as much as we need political democracy.

The vast majority of Americans recognize that Eugene Victor Debs was right when he said, a century ago, that “I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.

if we are serious about creating a truly free society, we must take the next step forward and guarantee every man, woman, and child in our country basic economic rights—the right to quality health care, the right to good education, the right to decent and affordable housing, the right to a secure retirement, and the right to live in a clean environment. And the right to a secure, well-paying, and meaningful job.

The very existence of billionaires is not just about who has the money and who doesn’t. It is also a manifestation of a corrupt political system, in which immense power over the lives of the great mass of Americans is concentrated in the hands of a small number of people who—through campaign finance arrangements that can only be described as legalized bribery—buy control of our elections and the policies that extend from them.

Our struggle is against a system where the top twenty-five hedge fund managers in the United States pocket more money than 350,000 kindergarten teachers combined. When did we the people make that determination? When did we decide that a drug company executive at Moderna can collect a “golden parachute” valued at $926 million for not working, while EMT workers who work around the clock to save lives make as little as $40,000 a year?

In a country where there is little honest debate about our economic system, and only marginally more debate about the political system that sustains it, the idea of rejecting unfettered capitalism—and of doing away with the billionaire class—may sound radical. It’s not. The goal of any democratic, moral, and rational nation must be to create a society where people are healthy, happy, and able to live long and productive lives. Not just the rich and the powerful, but all people.

Even as the centrist vote coalesced around Biden, and the progressive and liberal vote was divided, our campaign still won California, Colorado, Utah, and Vermont on Super Tuesday. But Biden beat us in Texas by around sixty thousand votes. That narrow win, along with solid victories in Virginia, Massachusetts, and Minnesota, gave the former vice president a huge boost. Our campaign, which days earlier had been expected to win the most delegates on Super Tuesday, was suddenly trailing. Biden had the lead, and the momentum. Warren left the race a few days later, and with the exit of Bloomberg, what had been a twenty-three-candidate contest was down to a two-man race between Biden and me.

I think the more accurate answer as to why Trump has won working-class support lies in the pain, desperation, and political alienation that millions of working-class Americans now experience and the degree to which the Democratic Party has abandoned them for wealthy campaign contributors and the “beautiful people.” These are Americans who, while the rich get much richer, have seen their real wages stagnate and their good union jobs go to China and Mexico. They can’t afford health care, they can’t afford childcare, they can’t afford to send their kids to college and are scared to death about a retirement with inadequate income. Because of what doctors call “diseases of despair,” their communities are even seeing a decline in life expectancy.

The goal of any democratic, moral, and rational nation must be to create a society where people are healthy, happy and able to live long and productive lives. Not just the rich and the powerful, but all people. Our greatness should be determined not by the number of billionaires who live in our country, the size of our GDP, the number of nuclear weapons we have, or how many channels we receive on cable TV. We should judge our success as a nation by looking at the quality of life of the average American. How healthy is he? How satisfied is she in her work? How happy are their children? We must move away from the economic mentality of scarcity and austerity, to a mindset that seeks prosperity for all. To those who say that in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, there is not enough to care for all the people, our answer must be, 'that’s absurd. Of course there’s enough.

On the eve of Super Tuesday, the establishment struck. Despite having raised tens of millions of dollars, and having run campaigns that were still seen in many circles as credible, two of the leading moderate Democrats in the race, Pete Buttigieg and Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar, abruptly canceled their candidacies and endorsed Biden. Both flew to Texas, the most hotly contested of the primary states, to appear with the former vice president. They were joined by another former candidate, Texan Beto O’Rourke, in a highly choreographed show of support. The establishment had succeeded in uniting, in support of Biden, the candidates who had been dividing up the moderate vote. Meanwhile, the liberal and progressive vote continued to be divided between Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren and myself. Despite poor showings in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina, Warren chose to stay in the race. I was closer to her on the issues than any other candidate. But, at a point where her endorsement could have been significant in a number of Super Tuesday states, she chose not to give it. Even

During the 2016 US presidential campaign, the hatred shown toward Hillary Clinton far outstripped even the most virulent criticisms that could legitimately be pinned on her. She was linked with “evil” and widely compared to a witch, which is to say that she was attacked as a woman, not as a political leader. After her defeat, some of those critics dug out the song “Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead,” sung in The Wizard of Oz to celebrate the Witch of the East’s death—a jingle already revived in the UK at the time of Margaret Thatcher’s death in 2013. This reference was brandished not only by Donald Trump’s electors, but also by supporters of Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s main rival in the primaries. On Sanders’ official site, a fundraising initiative was announced under the punning title “Bern the Witch”—an announcement that the Vermont senator’s campaign team took down as soon as it was brought to his attention. Continuing this series of limp quips, the conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh quipped, “She’s a witch with a capital B”—he can’t have known that, at the Salem witch trials in the seventeenth century, a key figure had already exploited this consonance by calling his servant, Sarah Churchill, who was one of his accusers, “bitch witch.” In reaction, female Democrat voters started sporting badges calling themselves “Witches for Hillary” or “Hags for Hillary.”48

class. We’re not starting from scratch, though. The Bernie Sanders campaign encouraged millions to believe that things can be different. New mass actions, such as 2018’s teacher strikes, have also revealed in our own age the power of working people. What we need now are organizations: working-class parties and unions that can unite scattered resistance into a socialist movement.1 Easier said than done. But this chapter offers a road map based on the long, complex, variously inspiring and dismal history of left politics—for challenging capitalism and creating a democratic socialist alternative to it. 1. Class-struggle social democracy does not close avenues for radicals; it opens them. On the face of it, Corbyn and Sanders advocate a set of demands that are essentially social democratic. But they represent something far different from modern social democracy. Whereas social democracy morphed in the postwar period into a tool to suppress class conflict in favor of tripartite arrangements among business, labor, and the state, both of these leaders encourage a renewal of class antagonism and movements from below. To

The good news for us was that polling showed we were winning many of the Super Tuesday states, including the two that would choose the largest numbers of delegates, California and Texas. The bad news for us was that the establishment fully understood the threat they faced, and it was prepared to do everything in its power to prevent us from prevailing. It wasn’t a secret. Time magazine reported on February 27 that “Big-Money Democratic Donors Are Trying to Stop Bernie Sanders,” while a March 2 New York Times headline announced, “Democratic Leaders Willing to Risk Party Damage to Stop Bernie Sanders.

Four years later, in 2020, we won the popular vote against a huge field of candidates in the first three Democratic primary states—Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada. The result: a panicked political establishment came together behind Joe Biden, the one candidate they thought could beat us. The other candidates were asked to drop out.

While an exceptionally wealthy few wallow in affluence and become exponentially richer with each passing day, the majority of Americans live lives of quiet desperation.

If we truly intend to make America great, we will strive to be a nation that has eliminated poverty, homelessness, and diseases of despair, where hard work is rewarded with a living wage, and where those who are too old or too infirm to work are protected by a safety net that guarantees no American will be destitute. That’s not a utopian vision or some foreign construct.

Instead of spending more money on the military than the next ten nations combined, we should lead the world in diplomacy and international collaboration, especially when it comes to preventing wars and combating climate change.

Yet the rise of Trump—and Bernie Sanders too—vastly transcends ordinary politics. In fact, it reaches deep into a ruined national economy that has morphed into rank casino capitalism under the misguided policies and faithless rule of the Washington and Wall Street elites. This epic deformation has delivered historically unprecedented setbacks to the bottom 90% of American households. They have seen their real wealth and living standards steadily deteriorate for several decades now, even as vast financial windfalls have accrued to the elite few at the very top. In fact, during the last 30 years, the real net worth of the bottom 90% has not increased at all. At the same time, the top 1% has experienced a 300% gain while the real wealth of the Forbes 400 has risen by 1,000%.

Socialists have taken advantage of every crisis to promote their policies and spend millions of dollars on marketing (oh, the irony) to convince young people that socialism can take care of everything for them. Bernie Sanders alone has three houses. He’s made millions of dollars under capitalism while preaching like a crazy person for its opposite. Let’s call him the “Commie Capitalist.” People like him say that socialism can pay off student loans, provide a universal basic income, even provide free college and health care. In 2016, a YouGov poll found that 44 percent of young people between the ages of sixteen and twenty-nine would rather live in a socialist country than a capitalist one like the United States. As if that weren’t scary enough, only 33 percent of the people could even describe with any accuracy what the word socialism means. This is precisely the way Bernie Sanders has wanted it all along: push lies for years until you make a majority of the population ignorant enough to believe those lies.

in a sense, both of them faced the same opponent: an outside super-PAC funded by wealthy donors who wanted to beat progressives standing with the working class of this country.

It is said that wealth cannot buy happiness. Perhaps that is true. But it is undeniably true that poverty can lead to despair

the physiology of poverty.” In other words, poor people, who struggle every day just to survive, live under enormous levels of stress—day after day, month after month, year after year. This never-ending stress impacts not only their psychological well-being, but their physiology as well. Stress makes us sick. Stress kills. It’s a factor in heart disease, cancer, high blood pressure, gastrointestinal problems, migraines, obesity, disrupted sleep patterns, and, all too often, alcohol and drug addiction. Wealthy and middle-class people don’t worry much about whether there will be food on the table, whether there will be a roof over their heads, or whether they’ll be able to get to the doctor when they are sick. Poor people do. Tens of millions of them. Every day is a painful and stressful struggle just to survive.

we never get around to discussing the reality that, after adjusting for inflation, the average worker in America is making $44 a week less today than she made fifty years ago.

what has not changed is the sense of empowerment that grows when working people are treated not as “employees,” but as “owners” who share responsibility for defining the scope and character of their jobs.

there are many ways to organize workplaces, and that we have a responsibility to identify the models that respect workers as human beings, and allow them to realize their full potential.

What does it actually mean to be free? Are you truly free if you are unable to go to a doctor when you are sick, or face financial bankruptcy when you leave the hospital? Are you truly free if you cannot afford the prescription drugs you need to stay alive? Are you truly free when you spend half of your limited income on housing, and are forced to borrow money from a payday lender at 200 percent interest rates? Are you truly free if you are seventy years old and have to continue working because you lack a pension or enough money to retire? Are you truly free if you are unable to attend college or a trade school because your family lacks the income? Are you truly free if you are forced to work sixty or eighty hours a week because you can’t find a job that pays a living wage? Are you truly free if you are a mother or father with a newborn baby but you are forced to go back to work immediately after the birth because you lack paid family leave? Are you truly free if you are a small business owner or family farmer who is driven out of the marketplace by the monopolistic practices of big business? Are you truly free if you are a veteran who put your life on the line to defend this country, and now sleep out on the streets?

We need an economic system that serves humanity rather than exploits it. There can be honest debates about how best to achieve that end, but to my view there are at least four steps that must be taken:

There is no real freedom without economic justice.

if a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists.

You’re either on the side of workers and organized labor, or you’re not.

asking the right questions.

its historic mission of emancipating the workers of the world from the thraldom of the ages is as certain of ultimate realization as is the setting of the sun.

This country has reached a point in its history where it must determine whether we truly embrace the inspiring words in our Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” Or do we simply accept that we will continue to be ruled by a small number of extremely wealthy and powerful people who are motivated by greed and could care less for the general welfare?

But oligarchy is not a uniquely Russian phenomenon. It’s a global reality that our corporate media chooses to examine in only the narrowest of terms. What about the oligarchs of America? What about the perverse and destructive role that they play in shaping our society? Why is there no acknowledgment, by our political and media elites, that there is an American oligarchy every bit as dangerous as the oligarchies we decry in other countries?

In this nation I see tens of millions of its citizens—a substantial part of its whole population—who at this very moment are denied the greater part of what the very lowest standards of today call the necessities of life. I see millions of families trying to live on incomes so meager that the pall of family disaster hangs over them day by day. I see millions whose daily lives in city and on farm continue under conditions labeled indecent by a so-called polite society half a century ago. I see millions denied education, recreation, and the opportunity to better their lot and the lot of their children. I see millions lacking the means to buy the products of farm and factory and by their poverty denying work and productiveness to many other millions. I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.

Socialism always begins with a universal vision for the brotherhood of man and ends with people having to eat their own pets.

The Democratic Party has endured an equally fatal loss of authority. Barack Obama in 2008 crushed a true establishment—fronted, as it happened, by Hillary Clinton. For eight years, Obama and his immediate circle felt no debt and little allegiance to the party organization.18 In the 2016 Democratic primaries, more than 40 percent of the vote, and all the militant passion, went to Bernie Sanders—an old, white, dull, socialist Independent. Many of his supporters saw Clinton and other mainstream Democrats as cogs in a system they despised. In somewhat slower motion than the Republicans, the Democratic Party is unbundling into dozens of political war-bands, each driven by the hunger for meaning and identity, all focused with monomaniacal intensity on a particular cause: feminism, the environment, anti-capitalism, pro-immigration, or racial or sexual grievance. The schism has been veiled by the generalized loathing of all things Trump: but I find it hard to envision a national party thriving on tribalism and wars of identity.

British businessman Cecil Rhodes, “who founded the Round Table groups, a precursor of the Council on Foreign Relations and its offshoot, The Trilateral Commission.” Members of the Frankfurt School sought to develop a theory of society based on Marxism. They, along with the Tavistock Institute, were instrumental in aligning America and the EU with their Marxist vision of state control and management of the economy. These organizations have worked to create new forms of state-run capitalism—a euphemism for socialism, which became wildly popular among youth during the presidential campaign of Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed socialist. Marxism, socialism, communism, and progressivism are designed to destroy the individuality of men and women created in God’s image. The goal is to create a hive mind where everyone thinks the same. In Marxism and its variants, the infinite, personal, living God of the universe is replaced by the state or the “collective.” This permits totalitarianism under a godless state. The Frankfurt School, whose representatives later occupied key positions in important American universities like Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley, understood the importance of controlling the media in producing “massification.” Ultimately, ideas like massification, collectivism, conformity, and the New Age movement were designed by a secretive occult elite to control the masses. All these concepts contradict God’s plan for humanity.

Yet, despite the enormous size of its budget, the Pentagon remains the only federal agency not to have successfully completed an independent audit.

The sad truth is that, if you boil it down, the essence of the Democratic message in recent years has been: “We’re pretty bad, but Republicans are worse. So vote for us. We’re the lesser of two evils!

What frustrated the insiders was the prospect that they and their wealthy friends, the lobbyists and the consultants, were losing control of a party they thought of as their personal possession.

With millions of Americans falling further and further behind economically, losing faith in government, and feeling ignored by the political establishment, Trump played on their anger and resentment through sometimes subtle but often overt appeals to racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia. He employed the classic calculus of the authoritarian. People needed enemies—and Trump gave them plenty.

the greatest obstacle to reach social change has everything to do with the power of the corporate and political establishment to limit our vision as to what is possible and what we are entitled to as human beings.

Not only were Trump’s policies reactionary and anti-worker, there was real uncertainty about whether democracy would survive if he remained in power.

Trump promised he would stand with working families,” I explained. “He said that he would ‘drain the swamp,’ take on Wall Street and powerful special interests. He would protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid and, by the way, he would provide health care to ‘everybody.’ Well. None of that was true. Instead, he gave trillions to the top one percent and large corporations, and filled his administration with billionaires. He tried to throw thirty-two million people off of their health insurance, eliminate protections for preexisting conditions, and submitted budgets that proposed slashing Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security.