For the life of me I can not understand why people keep supporting politicians who have been bought and paid for by the likes of the Koch brothers and the oil and gas industry.
“$100 from 2 million people … a total of $200 million … is 20 percent of what the Koch brothers themselves are prepared to spend. … Maybe the game is over. Maybe they have bought the United States government. Maybe there is no turning back. Maybe we’ve gone over the edge. I don’t know. I surely hope not. But we have to look at that reality.”
“The oil and gas industry, which stands to benefit from the Keystone XL pipeline, gave $236,544 on average to the senators who voted yes on Keystone ..”
“We need to take a hard look at our trade policies which have resulted in the outsourcing of millions of good paying jobs,” …. “Since 2001 we have lost more than 60,000 factories in this country, and more than 4.9 million decent-paying manufacturing jobs. We must end our disastrous trade policies (NAFTA, CAFTA, PNTR with China, etc.) which enable corporate America to shut down plants in this country and move to China and other low-wage countries.”
“… the US has ‘by far, the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major country on earth … ‘”
“In today’s highly competitive global economy, millions of Americans are unable to afford the higher education they need in order to get good-paying jobs. Some of our young people have given up the dream of going to college, while others are leaving school deeply in debt.”
“We need to end the race to the bottom and develop trade policies which demand that American corporations create jobs here, and not abroad,”
“… the US must ‘join the rest of the industrialized world and recognize that health care is a right of all, and not a privilege.’”
“Despite the fact that more than 40 million Americans have no health insurance, we spend almost twice as much per capita on health care as any other nation. We need to establish a Medicare-for-all, single-payer system,”
“… those issues highlight only some parts of the ‘unprecedented struggle that we’re engaged in now against the Billionaire Class.’”
“[W]e are moving rapidly away from our democratic heritage into an oligarchic form of society,” … “Today, the most serious problem we face is the grotesque and growing level of wealth and income inequality. This a profound moral issue, this is an economic issue and this is a political issue.”
“The real struggle is whether we can prevent this country from moving to an oligarchic form of society in which virtually all economic and political power rests with a handful of billionaires,” … “And that’s a struggle we must win.”
Barney Miller
http://billmoyers.com/…/bernie-sanders-keeping-us-becoming…/
“… figures adjusted for inflation … reveal the median male worker in the United States earned $783 less in 2013 than he made 41 years ago. … annual earnings for the median female worker in the U.S. declining by $1,337 between 2007 and 2013. Since 1999, … household income for the median middle-class family is less than it was a quarter century ago.”
BUT
“CEO pay grew an astounding 937% over the past 35 years. The explosion in executive compensation greatly outpaces growth in the stock market and economic productivity.”
“Taxpayers are ripped off by this system. Two Democratic senators, Jack Reed of Rhode Island and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, introduced the Stop Subsidizing Multimillion Dollar Corporate Bonuses Act in 2013 to allow public companies to take write-offs only up to $1 million per employee. But that bill, S. 1476, has even less chance of passing in the next two years than it did when it was introduced. ” (Thanks to the Koch brothers successful purchase of Congress last year.)
http://www.dailykos.com/…/-Report-Overpaid-CEOs-hurt-shareh…
