[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 2 (Wednesday, January 7, 2015)]
[Senate]
[Pages S36-S38]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  IMPORTANT ISSUES FACING OUR COUNTRY

  Mr. SANDERS. Madam President, as we begin this new session, I think 
it is important for us to remember why we are here and what our job is 
as Senators. What our job is, it seems to me, is to try to understand 
the needs of the American people, the problems facing our constituents, 
and propose real solutions to those problems. So before we get involved 
in all of the debates I know we are going to have, let me put on the 
floor what I believe--in hearing from the people of the State of 
Vermont--are some of the most important issues facing our country and 
the need for the Senate, the Congress, and the President to address 
those issues.
  First and foremost, to my mind, is the state of American democracy. 
We are a democracy, and men and women have fought and died to preserve 
American democracy, which means the people of America--not kings, not 
queens, not an aristocracy but the people of this country--regardless 
of where they come from or their economic status, have the right to 
participate in the political process, to elect their leaders and create 
the future they want for themselves and their kids.
  What is the status of American democracy today? We just came out of a 
midterm election where Republicans did very well. But I think it is 
important to understand that in that election--that national election--
63 percent of the American people didn't vote. Eighty percent of young 
people didn't vote. The overwhelming majority of low-income and working 
people didn't vote.
  There are a million reasons an individual doesn't vote, but my guess 
is that for many people they look at the political process and they 
say: Yes, my family is hurting. I am working longer hours for lower 
wages. My job went to China. My kid can't afford to go to college. I 
can't afford health insurance. What are those people in Washington 
doing to protect my interest? Not much--not the Republicans, not the 
Democrats. I am hurting. What are they doing? People say: Hey, I don't 
want to participate in this process. It doesn't mean anything. I am not 
going to vote.
  I think another aspect about why people don't vote is they turn on 
their TVs and they are bombarded with 30-second ugly television ads--
often ads that come not even from the candidate but from people who do 
``independent expenditures.'' As a result of the disastrous Supreme 
Court decision on Citizens United, billionaires, corporations are now 
allowed to spend unlimited sums of money in a political process. If 
somebody is a billionaire, they can now spend hundreds and hundreds of 
millions of dollars to destroy other candidates or to elect the 
candidates they want.
  Is that truly what American democracy is supposed to be about? Do we 
believe that men and women fought and died for us so billionaires can 
elect candidates to protect the wealthy and the powerful?
  I would say at the very top of the agenda for this Congress should be 
a movement to overturn, through a constitutional amendment, this 
disastrous Supreme Court ruling on Citizens United. In my view, we 
should move toward public funding of elections so all of our people, 
regardless of their economic status, can participate in the political 
process and run for office.
  I think the next issue we have to take a very hard look at is the 40-
year decline of the American middle class. I know some of my Republican 
friends talk about what has happened under the Obama administration, 
and they are right in saying we are nowhere where we should be 
economically. No one debates that. But let us not forget where we were 
6 years ago when George W. Bush left office. Everybody remembers where 
we were: 700,000 people a month--a month--were losing their jobs.
  People say: Hey, we are growing 200,000 or 300,000 jobs a month now, 
not good enough. Right, it is not good enough, but growing 200,000 or 
300,000 jobs a month is a heck of a lot better than losing 700,000 jobs 
a month.
  Our financial system--the U.S. and the world's--was on the verge of 
financial collapse. That is where we were when Bush left office. Now 
Wall Street is doing very well.
  In terms of our deficit, when Bush left office we had a $1.4 trillion 
deficit. Now that deficit is somewhere around $500 billion. Are we 
where we want to be? No. Are we better off than we were 6 years ago? 
Absolutely.
  But when we look at the middle class today, we understand the 
problems are not just the last 6 years or the last 12 years. The 
problems are what has been going on over the last 40 years. The fact 
is, we have millions of working people who are earning, in real 
inflation-accounted dollars, substantially less than they were 40 years 
ago.
  How does it happen, when we are seeing an explosion in technology, 
when worker productivity has gone up, that the median male worker--that 
male worker right in the middle of the economy--earns $783 less last 
year than he made 41 years ago?
  Look at why people are angry. That is why they are angry. In 
inflation-accounted-for dollars, the median male worker is making $783 
less last year than he made 41 years ago. The median woman worker made 
$1,300 less last year than she made in 2007.
  Since 1999, the median middle-class family has seen its income go 
down by almost $5,000 after adjusting for inflation. So people all over 
this country look to Washington and they say: What is going on? You 
gave us this great global economy. You have all these great unfettered 
free-trade agreements. We have all this technology. Yes, I know the 
billionaires are getting richer, millionaires are getting richer, with 
95 percent of all new income going to the top 1 percent. We have one 
family, the Walton family, now owning more wealth than the bottom 40 
percent of Americans. Yes, the billionaires are doing great, but what 
is happening to me?
  What is happening to the middle class? The answer is, for a variety 
of reasons, in the last 40 years the middle class has shrunk 
significantly. Today we have more people living in poverty than at 
almost any other time in American history, and we have the highest rate 
of childhood poverty of any major country on Earth.
  So what do we do? What do we do to rebuild the middle class? What do 
we do to create the millions of decent-paying jobs we need? Let me 
throw out a few suggestions that I hope in this session of Congress we 
will address.
  For a start, everybody in America understands our infrastructure is 
collapsing--no great secret. According to the American Society of Civil 
Engineers, nearly one-quarter of the Nation's 600,000 bridges are 
structurally deficient or functionally obsolete, and more than 30 
percent have exceeded their design life.
  What that means is that all over this country bridges are being shut 
down because they are dangerous and they need repair, almost one third 
of America's roads are in poor or mediocre condition, and 42 percent of 
major urban highways are congested. As we speak, in cities all over 
America people are backed up in traffic jams, burning fuel and wasting 
time because we don't have proper infrastructure. The American Society 
of Civil Engineers says we must invest $1.7 trillion by 2020--5 years--
just to get our Nation's roads, bridges, and transit to a state of good 
repair--more than four times the current rate of spending.

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  So what happens when we invest in infrastructure? I will introduce 
legislation to invest $1 trillion in rebuilding our roads, bridges, 
water systems, wastewater plants, aquifers, older schools, and rail. 
When we do that, $1 trillion in infrastructure investment not only 
makes our country more productive and efficient, but it also creates a 
substantial number of decent-paying jobs. A $1 trillion investment 
would maintain and create 13 million decent-paying jobs. The fastest 
way to create good-paying jobs is to rebuild our crumbling 
infrastructure. In my view, that should be a very, very high priority 
for this Congress.
  The second issue I think we need to address--and I understand there 
are differences of opinion on this issue. I think when our kids and our 
grandchildren look back on this period and they look at an issue such 
as the Keystone Pipeline, they will be saying: What were you people 
thinking about? How could you go forward in terms of increasing the 
exploration and production of some of the dirtiest oil on this planet 
when virtually all of the scientists were telling us that we have to 
substantially reduce carbon emissions and not increase carbon 
emissions?
  In my view, an important mission of this Congress is to listen to the 
science and the scientific community. They are telling us loudly and 
clearly that climate change is real, climate change is caused by human 
activity, climate change is already causing devastating problems in 
America and around the world in terms of drought, in terms of flooding, 
in terms of extreme weather disturbances, and we have to transform our 
energy system away from fossil fuel and into energy efficiency, into 
weatherization, into wind, into solar, into geothermal, and into other 
sustainable energies. When we do that, we not only lead the world in 
reversing climate change, but we also create a significant number of 
jobs.
  In this last election, interestingly enough in some of the most 
conservative States in America, voters voted to raise the minimum wage 
because they understand that a minimum wage of $7.25 an hour--here in 
Washington, DC, the Federal minimum wage--is literally a starvation 
wage. No family, no individual can live on $7.25 an hour. I applaud all 
those fast food workers all over this country--people who work at 
McDonald's and Burger King--for having the courage to go out on the 
streets and say: We have to raise the minimum wage. I applaud their 
courage in doing that, and I applaud the many States around this 
country, including the State of Vermont, who have raised the minimum 
wage. In my view, if someone works 40 hours a week, they should not be 
living in poverty. I hope that one of the major priorities in this 
Congress is to raise the minimum wage to a living wage. Over a period 
of years, I would raise that minimum wage to $15 an hour.
  It is also unacceptable that in America today women who do the same 
work as men earn 78 cents on the dollar compared to male workers. I 
think we have to address this discrimination, and we need to move 
forward with pay equity for women workers.
  When we talk about the decline of the American middle class and the 
fact that millions of workers are working longer hours for lower wages, 
when we talk about the fact that in the last 14 or so years this 
country has lost 60,000 factories and millions of good-paying 
manufacturing jobs--when we put that issue on the table, we begin the 
discussion which is long, long overdue about our trade policies. That 
is what we have to talk about. The truth of the matter is that from 
Republican leadership in the White House to Democratic leadership in 
the White House, there has been support for a number of trade policies 
which, when looking at the cold facts, have failed. NAFTA has failed. 
CAFTA has failed. Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China--PNTR--
has failed. Over the last 30 years, Republican Presidents and 
Democratic Presidents have continued to push unfettered free trade 
agreements which say to American workers: Guess what. You are now going 
to be competing against somebody in China who makes $1.50 an hour. If 
you don't like it, we are going to move our plant to China.
  And many companies have done exactly that. Do we think that is fair? 
Do we think that is right? I don't.
  We are going to be coming up with the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade 
agreement, TPP. Without going into great detail at this point, I have 
very, very serious problems with that agreement. In terms of the 
process, no Member of this Congress has been able to walk into the 
office where these documents--highly complicated legal documents--are 
held, bring staff in there, and copy the information. We are not 
allowed to do that, but we are supposed to vote on a fast-track 
agreement to give the President the authority to negotiate that 
agreement. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
  So I hope we use the TPP as an opportunity to rethink our trade 
agreements. Trade is a good thing, but American workers should not 
suffer from unfettered free trade. Trade should be used to benefit the 
middle class and working families of this country and not just the 
multinational corporations.
  We live in a highly competitive global economy. Everybody understands 
that. I think we also understand that our young people are not going to 
do well and our economy does not do well unless our people have the 
education they need to effectively compete in this global economy. It 
saddens me to note that a number of years ago the United States of 
America led the world in terms of the percentage of people who had 
college degrees. We were number one. Today we are number 12. The reason 
is that the cost of college has soared at the same time that the income 
of many middle-class and working-class people has declined. We are in a 
position now where hundreds of thousands of young people thinking about 
their future look at the cost of college, look at the debt they will 
incur when they leave college, and they are saying: I don't want to go 
to college. I am not going to go to college. I am not going to get 
post-high school education. That is a very bad thing for this country. 
It is a bad thing for our economy. We should put high up on the agenda 
the issue of how in America all of our people, regardless of the income 
of their families, can get the education they need without going deeply 
in debt. This issue of college indebtedness is a horror.
  I remember a few months ago talking to a young woman in Burlington, 
VT, who left medical school $300,000 in debt. Her crime was that she 
wanted to become a doctor and work with low-income people. She 
shouldn't be punished with a debt of $300,000. Other people are 
graduating college $50,000 in debt. And graduate school--we have 
attorneys in my office who have a debt of over $100,000. We can do 
better than that as a nation.
  Those are some of the issues. There are others out there. But I think 
what is most important is that we try to listen to where the American 
people are today--to the pain of a declining middle-class, to single 
moms desperately struggling to raise their kids with dignity, to older 
people trying to retire with a shred of dignity.
  On that issue, let me be very clear. If there is an attempt going to 
be made here in the Senate to cut Social Security or to cut Medicare, 
there will be at least one Senator fighting vigorously on that. Poverty 
among seniors is going up. Millions of seniors in this country are 
trying to make it on $12,000, $13,000, $14,000 a year. The last thing 
we should be talking about is cutting Social Security. In fact, we 
should be talking about expanding Social Security.
  There are a lot of issues out there. I hope we don't get lost in the 
weeds. I hope we focus on those issues that are major concerns to the 
American people. I hope very much that we have the courage to stand up 
to the very, very wealthy campaign contributors and their lobbyists who 
have enormous influence over what takes place here, and that we in fact 
represent the people who sent us here who are overwhelmingly middle-
class and working-class people.
  Madam President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a 
quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Flake). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.

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