I wonder if the term, "The Soul of America," is appropriate in that I see a lot of soulless forces out there, minions of Mammon.
Sen. Sanders wrote:
In America today, we have the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on earth, and more inequality than at any time period since 1928. The top 1 percent owns 42 percent of the financial wealth of the nation, while, incredibly, the bottom 60 percent own only 2.3 percent. One family, the Walton family of Wal-Mart, owns more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of Americans. In terms of income distribution in 2010, the last study done on this issue, the top 1 percent earned 93 percent of all new income while the bottom 99 percent shared the remaining 7 percent.
Despite the reality that the rich are becoming much richer while the middle class collapses and the number of Americans living in poverty is at an all-time high, the Republicans and their billionaire backers want more, more, and more. The class warfare continues.
My Republican colleagues say that the deficits are a spending problem, not a revenue problem. What these deficit-hawk hypocrites won't talk about is their spending. They won't discuss what they did to dig the country into this $1 trillion deep deficit hole. They waged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq without paying for them. They gave away huge tax breaks for the rich. They squandered taxpayer dollars on the pharmaceutical industry by making it illegal to let Medicare bargain for lower drug prices. They also rescinded financial regulations that enabled Wall Street to operate like a gambling casino, leading to a severe recession that eroded tax revenue and left more than 14 percent of American workers unemployed or underemployed.
That is the start of things, and it goes on from there. Read it online.
Everything Sanders says is true, and obfuscators can try but cannot cogently discredit his truths. The entire thing, again, here.
McConnell does not appear to have earned high esteem in Sanders' mind:
Republicans like Senator Minority Leader Mitch McConnell who say the revenue debate is over don't want you to consider these facts:
• Federal revenue today, at 15.8 percent of GDP, is lower today than it was 60 years ago. During the last year of the Clinton administration, when we had a significant federal surplus, federal revenue was 20.6 percent of GDP.
• Today corporate profits are at an all-time high, while corporate income tax revenue as a percentage of GDP is near a record low.
• In 2011, corporate revenue as a percentage of GDP was just 1.2 percent -- lower than any other major country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, including Britain, Germany, France, Japan, Canada, Norway, Australia, South Korea, Switzerland, Norway, Italy, Ireland, Poland, and Iceland.
• In 2011, corporations paid just 12 percent of their profits in taxes, the lowest since 1972.
• In 2005, one out of four large corporations paid no income taxes at all while they collected $1.1 trillion in revenue over that one-year period.
We know where the Republicans are coming from. What about the Democrats? Will President Obama fulfill his campaign pledge to "protect the middle class" or will he surrender [...]
[italics added] Read it all at HufPo.
Some may confuse "surrender" with actual earlier intentions, embellished for purposes of campaign rhetoric and victory. With Clinton then and Obama now complete treading along the middle-road is observable, attuned to the business interests that all too often can be presidential gatekeepers. We have Sanders, and who else? We the People?
__________UPDATE___________
Yes, I voted each time for Obama. The first term with more enthusiasm and belief.
A bit jaded, second time, my God, it was him or Paul Ryan. And the wood Totem man. Romney. The Republicans might have had a shot at running without embracing a zombie ticket. But, they did, they lost, etc.
The Republicans deserved to lose far, far, far more than Obama deserved to win. Disagree if you like. Did the fat cats really lose at all?
_________FURTHER UPDATE________
Sanders in wrapping up does mention the Wall Street misbehavior tax others have suggested as beneficent if ever again imposed. Time is overdue to curb Wall Street. There is the problem. There is not the Congressional will. So we citizens suffer, because with few exceptions, both ways, Elizabeth Warren one way, Rand Paul another, we get pablum left or pablum right as a choice, either way, pablum. I think right now we have a better council in Ramsey than we have a House in Washington. Clearly. Up and down the row at the dias at present.