For those not aware we have a Democratic Socialist elected and representing a area of Vermont, here is a adaptation of a speech he made for you to read. It goes deeper than the labels some apply to stop you from reading his views. I don't mind telling you I despise the U.N. and am a vocal opponent of any form of centralized power, so don't agree with all he says, but it is worth reading to be informed. Next time someone says what's Sanders position as a Socialist, you won't have to just say, "Commies are pinkos let's kill em", or some other mindless nonsense.Tell me what you think of it.
EXCERPT BEGINS
We Are the Majority

by Bernie Sanders

Representative Bernie Sanders is an Independent and a
democratic socialist from Vermont. This is adapted from a
speech he gave at "Fighting Bob Fest" in Baraboo, Wisconsin,
on September 6. The festival is named after Senator Robert
"Fighting Bob" La Follette, one of the leaders of the progressive
movement and the founder of this magazine.

The Progressive

http://www.progressive.org/feb04/sand0204.html

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.

Because of the greed of corporate America, real wages in the private
sector are 8 percent less than they were thirty years ago. And where has
all of that accumulated wealth gone? It has gone to the people on top,
who have seen a huge increase in the percentage of wealth and income
they receive.

Let me say a word about those people. And it's important that we talk
about that because you're not going to read about it in most newspapers
or see it on television.

It is very clear that these people have put their own greed ahead of the
middle class and working families of this country. What they are now
doing is living in guarded compounds. They don't have to get on the
airlines like you do. They fly in their Lear jets. They don't get on
crowded mass transit to get to work. They don't have to worry about
how their kids are going to go to college or high school because they
have the money to send their kids to the best private schools in
America; they have enough money to buy their way to get their kids
into any college in America. That's how they live--separate and
segregated from what's going on in this country. And our job is to tell
them that if they don't come back to America, then the hell with them.
We'll go forward without them. If the President of the United States
were here today--and believe me, I wish he were here today, I wish
he would come out and talk to ordinary Americans--he would tell you
his greatest accomplishment is the tax breaks that he has given
America. What he won't tell you is that 40 percent of those tax breaks
went to the richest 1 percent, the people who need it the least, and
that millions and millions of Americans who really need those tax
breaks are getting nothing or only a few dollars. What he will also
not tell you is what's really behind those tax breaks.

The President of the United States represents, and works very hard for,
the very wealthiest people in this country. And, just coincidentally, he
is on his way to raising $200 million from these very same people for
his primary campaign--and he doesn't even have an opponent. So it
doesn't surprise us that when he gives out tax breaks, they mostly go to
the rich and the heads of large corporations. That we can understand.
It's grotesque, but that's politics. More money is flying into Congress
in campaign contributions than you can believe. You've got to duck
so you don't get hit by the money.

What is even more cynical about these tax breaks is that here you have
a conservative President and a conservative party, which for years have
been ranting and raving about how terrible deficits are. But now they
are giving us the largest deficit in American history. Why are they
driving up a huge national debt that our kids and grandchildren are
going to have to pay off? I'll tell you why they are doing that. They
are doing that so that they'll come back before the American people
and say, "We cannot afford to maintain Social Security; privatize it. We
can't afford to protect Medicare and Medicaid; privatize it. We can't
afford to protect the Veterans Administration; privatize it." That is
their cynical plan: to destroy the basic rights that millions of people
have fought for and received, and to bring us back to the nineteenth
century, where the American people had no rights, where the elderly were
the poorest people in our society, where children slept out on the
streets without nutrition programs, where workers were unable to form
unions, where there were no health care programs for the elderly. That
is what they are trying to do, and we are not going to allow them to get
away with it.

Our struggle, the struggle of millions of people for 150 years, has been
for basic human dignity. It has been a struggle to create a country that
belongs to all of us and not just the people on top, and that is our
struggle of today.

Sometimes progressives say, well, you know, we're right, but we're
really kind of fringe. Our views are not reflective of a vast majority
of the people. After all, Bush, well, was almost elected, and there is
rightwing control of the House of Representatives, led by a gentleman
named Tom DeLay. There is rightwing control of the United States Senate.

Very few people in the media reflect our point of view. So they must be
representing the majority of the people, and we're just a smart minority
of the people.

I want you to disabuse yourselves of that notion. You represent
mainstream America. We are the majority.

Go out on Main Street, stand at the corner, and ask people a simple
question. Tell them you're doing an informal poll, and ask them if they
want 40 percent of the tax breaks, hundreds of billions of dollars, to
go to the top 1 percent, or whether those breaks should be spread
around more fairly and be used for education or lowering the deficit.
Then tell me who is "fringe." Ask them if we should maintain our
disintegrating health care nonsystem or establish a universal health
care system that guarantees health care for all. Then tell me who is
"fringe." Ask them if we should continue to let polluters destroy our
environment, or move to safe, sustainable energy. Then tell me
who is "fringe."

So how do the rightwingers get elected if they have nothing to say about
the most important issues facing the American people? That is the
central question of modern American politics. And the answer is that
they work day and night to divide the American people against each
other so that they end up voting against their own best interests. That is
what the Republican Party is all about.

They tell white workers their jobs are being lost not because corporate
America is downsizing and moving to China, but because black workers
are taking their jobs--because of affirmative action. White against black.

If you turn on talk radio, what you will hear, in an almost compulsive
way, is a hatred of women. And they're telling working class guys, you
used to have some power. You used to be the breadwinner. But now there
are women running companies, women in politics, women making more
money than you. Men against women.

And they're turning straight people against gay people. The homosexuals
are taking over the schools! Gay marriage is destroying the country!
Straights against gays.

And if you're not for a war in Iraq waged on the dubious and illegal
doctrine of "preemptive war," you're somehow unpatriotic. And those of
us who were born in America are supposed to hate immigrants. And those
of us who practice religion in one way, or believe in the separation of
church and state, are supposed to be anti-religious, and trying to
destroy Christianity in America--and we get divided up on that. And on
and on it goes.

The Republican leadership does all of this in an incredibly cynical,
poll-driven way, because they know when you lay out their program about
the most important economic issues facing America, it ends up that they
are representing the interests of 2 percent of the population. You can't
win an election with the support of 2 percent. So they divide us, and
the result is that tens of millions of working people vote against their
own interests.

We know, that come election time, they will have huge sums of money that
we will never come near to having. But we also know something else: that
we are the vast majority of the people. We are the middle class and
working families, and there are a hell of a lot more of us than there
are of them.

To be effective politically, we cannot talk only to people who agree
with us. That's easy. The hard part is going out and talking to people
in the working and middle classes who don't yet agree with us. And we
have to understand that on some issues there will be differences of
opinion. But if we focus on the basic economic issues--and we explain to
people that when they cast their votes solely on issues like abortion,
or gay rights, or any other single issue, the rich and the powerful are
laughing all the way to the bank--we will be successful in bringing
people together and winning elections.

Now what are some of the issues? Let me just list a few.

The middle class is collapsing, and we need a fundamental alternative to
trickle down economics and unfettered free trade.

We've got to raise the minimum wage to a living wage.

We've got to renegotiate our disastrous trade policies that have cost us
millions of decent paying jobs.

We've got to change labor law so that workers can join unions when they
want to.

We've got to protect the overtime pay that workers have earned.

We've got to put people to work building affordable housing, schools,
mass transportation, and a sustainable energy system.

Our health care system is disintegrating, and we pay the highest prices
in the world for prescription drugs. Without spending a nickel more than
we now spend, we can guarantee health care to all Americans through a
single-payer national health care system. By standing up to the
pharmaceutical industry, we can lower the cost of prescription drugs by
30 to 50 percent, and develop a strong prescription drug benefit under
Medicare.

Our national priorities are backwards. Instead of giving huge tax breaks
to the rich and large corporations, we should provide for the middle
class and working families of this country. Higher education and child
care should be available to all Americans--regardless of income. Our
veterans should not be placed on waiting lists for the health care they
were promised. The national disgrace of the United States having the
highest rate of childhood poverty in the industrialized world must be
eliminated. We must expand and protect Social Security, not privatize it.

Environmental degradation is threatening the wellbeing of our planet. We
must move to sustainable and nonpolluting forms of energy as well as
energy conservation. Think about how many decent-paying jobs we can
create as we move this economy off of fossil fuel.

We must work for world peace, and not U.S. imperial power. The United
States must work with the United Nations and the international community
to stabilize Iraq so that the Iraqi people can control their future. We
must bring U.S. troops home as soon as feasible.

Today, we are honoring Bob La Follette. We're remembering one of your
other great members of Congress, Victor Berger. We remember your fellow
Midwesterner Eugene Debs. And we remember all of those people throughout
history, some of them whose names we don't know, people who struggled
for workers' rights, for public education, against racism, sexism,
homophobia. Some of them died in their struggle. Many of them suffered.
What they had in common was a vision they fought for, and we're very
grateful that they passed that vision on to us.

And that vision is not the vision of George Bush, which basically says
it's every person for himself or herself, that we don't have to worry
about the children, we don't have to worry about the poor, we don't have
to worry about the old, we don't have to worry about working people.
We're all going to go out and get it for ourselves, to hell with the
environment, to hell with future generations, to hell with anybody else.
That's Bush's vision.

The vision that La Follette and others have given us is something that
we appreciate very much because it makes us all better human beings. In
this great country, we can create an economy that provides for a decent
standard of living for every man, woman, and child. We can have social
justice and end discrimination based on race, gender, and sexual
orientation. We can move toward harmony with the environment, not a war
against the environment.

We are part of an American community and a world community. And we are
not going to be going to war whenever the President of the United States
says it's a good idea. We're going to work with the international community,
with the United Nations, to create a world where we eliminate war and
eliminate poverty.

But to do this, we have to understand that politics is not just an
anti-war demonstration. It's not just coming out on a given day to
express concerns about the environment, or racism, or whatever the
single issue may be. Politics is a 365-day-a-year struggle. We have to
have the courage to knock on doors even if some people may disagree
with us. We've got to get on the telephone and start making calls.
We have to be in touch with our local radio and television stations
and the local newspaper. And when we do that, there is no doubt in
my mind that not only will we win the next election, but we will create
an America that Bob La Follette would be very proud of.
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