Editor’s note: Below are excerpts from a speech Bernie Sanders made at a rally in Queens, NY on Oct. 19.
Tonight in America, over 500,000 people find themselves homeless. Half of our population is struggling to pay their rent, mortgage, light bill, struggling to just stay alive and feed their families. Today in America, 87 million people are unable to go to the doctor when sick. Hundreds of thousands of bright young people are unable to fulfill their dreams because their families cannot afford the outrageous cost of higher education. Millions of senior citizens are unable to afford the prescription drugs they desperately need…
People on Wall Street live in ostentatious luxury while people work for starvation wages, worried about their children’s future. The top 1% have more wealth then ever. … Today we say to Wall Street and the billionaire class: you ain’t gonna get it all anymore. If Congress can give over $1 trillion in tax breaks to large corporations [and] spend $750 billion a year on the military, we can cancel all student debt and create up to 15 million good paying jobs rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. It’s not a radical idea to say that in America you have a right to drink clean water. We will create up to 20 million new jobs as we transform our energy system away from fossil fuel to sustainable energy … [and] have a Green New Deal.
American veterans and families with children are sleeping out on the streets [while] real estate developers gentrify. Our legislation will create a national rent control standard. We’re going to end private prisons and detention centers. Instead of spending $80 billion a year on incarceration, we are going to invest in our young people, in jobs and education. We are going to end demonization of the undocumented, pass comprehensive immigration reform and provide a path toward citizenship for all. We will not be a government that snatches babies from the arms of their mothers or puts children in cages. We will end the disastrous raids of the ICE.
We will end the racial disparity within the overall disparity. Today, the average white family owns more than 10 times the wealth of the average Black family. Black women are three times more likely to die from a pregnancy. As a result of a broken and racist criminal justice system, Black men are sentenced to 19% more jail time for committing the exact same crime as white men…
And today we say loudly that it is the women who have the right to control their own bodies, not the politicians.
We will pass a Medicare for All single payer program.
The wealthiest will pay their fair share of taxes. We will rescind Trump’s tax breaks for the billionaires and large corporations… and subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. And we do not have to spend more than 10 countries’ economies combined on defense spending. Whether Republican or Democratic establishments, Wall Street, insurance, drug, fossil fuel industries, military or prison industrial complex—it’s the whole damn 1% [and] they’re not giving up their wealth and power without a fight.
We are at a moment in our great country’s history where all of us coming together can create the America true to the principles that are the foundation of our democracy.
Are you willing to stand together and fight—and fight for someone you don’t know? If you and millions are … we will win this election and transform this country. Thank you all.
