[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 6]
[Senate]
[Pages 8516-8519]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                      SURVIVAL OF THE MIDDLE CLASS

  Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, about a month ago on my Web site, which 
is sanders.senate.gov, I requested that Vermonters e-mail me about what 
the collapse of the middle class means to them personally--not in 
esoteric economic terms but in a sense of what they are going through.
  Frankly, we are a small State, and our people are pretty reticent. 
People in Vermont don't like to open up and tell everybody all of the 
problems they have. They try to keep it to themselves. We expected that 
we would receive perhaps a few dozen replies. In fact, over the last 
month, we have received some 700 e-mails that came into my office 
talking about how people in the middle class today are trying 
desperately to survive. About 90 percent of the e-mails came from the 
State of Vermont. We have had a number from around the rest of the 
country.
  I sometimes think that many of our colleagues here really don't have 
much of a clue about what is going on in the real world. It is no great 
secret that the Halls of Congress are filled with lobbyists who make 
hundreds of thousands of dollars a year representing the energy 
companies, the coal companies, the oil companies, the drug companies, 
the insurance companies, the banks, and the credit card companies. They 
are all over the place, and they try to influence--and are successful 
in many instances--in influencing Congress to pass legislation that 
protects the interests of multinational corporations or the wealthiest 
people in this country. It is far too rare that we hear the pain and 
the reality of life that is going on among ordinary people, especially 
people who come from a rural State such as mine.
  What I wish to do is spend most of my time doing nothing more than 
just reading to my colleagues and for the American people some of the 
reality that takes place in a small, rural State

[[Page 8517]]

which I think is not radically different from what is taking place 
today all over this country. All of these are verbatim e-mails that I 
received from families in the State of Vermont. Let me begin by reading 
one which says:

       I make less than $35,000 a year and work hard to earn it. I 
     am trying to get by with rising costs of fuel. I have a wife 
     and four kids that I love dearly and I am trying to do the 
     best that I can for them. With the cost of gas pushing $4 a 
     gallon and the price of heating oil up to over $4 a gallon, 
     it is hard to make ends meet. On top of that, the furnace 
     that heats the house and keeps my kids warm died today, and 
     while it will not need to run much longer, the nights are 
     still too cold for a 3-year-old. I am not sure how I am going 
     to pay for the repairs. I never thought that I would be 
     classified as poor having grown up in an upper middle class 
     family, but that is where I am now. I don't know what we need 
     to do, but I know we need to do something before the middle 
     class is a thing of the past.

  As I read these stories, what you are going to hear today in the year 
2008 is that children are going cold in America, and we have to 
understand that. This is one example. I will read more. Anyone who 
thinks it is not true doesn't know what is going on in the real world. 
Here is another e-mail that I received:

       I am a teacher with 20 years of experience, and I have a 
     master's degree. As a single parent, I am struggling every 
     day to put food on the table.

  This is a teacher with a masters degree.

       Our clothes all come from thrift stores. I have a 5-year-
     old car that needs work. My son is gifted and talented. I 
     tried to sell my house to enroll him in a school that had 
     curriculum available for his special needs. After two years 
     on the market, my house never sold. The property taxes have 
     nearly doubled in 10 years, and the price of heating oil is 
     prohibitive. To meet the needs of my son, I let the house sit 
     and moved into an apartment near his high school. I don't go 
     to church many Sundays because the gasoline is too expensive 
     to drive there.

  Now, I wonder how many people all over this country are facing that 
same reality. I will read right from her letter:

       I don't go to church many Sundays because the gasoline is 
     too expensive to drive there.
       Every thought of an activity is dependent on the cost. I 
     can only purchase food from dented can stores. I don't know 
     how I can continue this way for two more years of my son's 
     high school; yet, I am trying to meet his academic and 
     psychological needs. I know that I will never be able to 
     retire on a teacher's retirement with no insurance. I am 
     stretched to the breaking point, with no help in sight.

  That is a teacher with a master's degree. This is not somebody who is 
unemployed, who never graduated high school. This is solid middle 
class. This is her reality.
  Here is another story:

       My wife and I live in rural Vermont. We own a home and make 
     about $75,000 a year combined.

  That is, in Vermont, not a bad income.

       We own two vehicles and travel about 74 miles a day 
     roundtrip to get to our jobs. Not only is the price of gas 
     killing us, I have been displaced from two jobs in the last 
     nine years due to the exportation of jobs overseas. My 
     current job is in jeopardy of being downsized due to the 
     economy. Every job I have had since I moved here in 1999 has 
     paid less, with less benefits. We are spending our life 
     savings just to make ends meet.

  When you read these stories, you hear recurring themes: The price of 
gas and people losing jobs due to outsourcing. Over and over again, 
these themes appear. I want to reiterate that these are not ``poor'' 
people, homeless people, people without any education. These are people 
who once considered themselves to be part of the American middle class. 
Similar to millions and millions of other people, that middle-class 
life is rapidly disappearing.
  Here is another one:

       I work full-time at the largest hospital in Vermont. I am 
     in more debt now than I was 10 years ago as a single mother 
     going full time to college and waitressing to make ends meet. 
     When is something going to be done to lower gas prices, which 
     have exponentially raised the cost of everything? I would 
     love to just tell my children, ``Yes, we can go out to the 
     movies'' and not have it break the bank.

  In other words, what you are seeing all over this country is for 
people who take a ride to church or go to the movies, they can no 
longer perform these basic joys of life because they cannot afford to 
do that anymore.
  Here is another letter:

       My husband and I have lived in Vermont our whole lives. We 
     have two small children (a baby and a toddler) and felt 
     fortunate to own our own house and land, but due to the 
     increasing fuel prices we have at times had to choose between 
     baby food, diapers, and heating fuel. We've run out of 
     heating fuel 3 times so far, and the baby has ended up in the 
     hospital with pneumonia 2 of the times. We try to keep the 
     kids warm with an electric space heater on those nights, but 
     that just doesn't do the trick.
       My husband does what he can just to scrape enough money for 
     car fuel each week, and we've gone from 3 vehicles to 1 just 
     to try and get by without going further into debt. We were 
     going to sell the house and rent, but the rent around here is 
     higher than what we pay for our monthly mortgage and property 
     taxes combined. Please help.

  This is the story in America in 2008--a family not having enough heat 
and their child getting pneumonia. This is the United States of America 
in 2008. She asks, ``Please help.'' Well, let's help.
  This is from north central Vermont:

       Due to illness, my ability to work has been severely 
     limited. I am making $10 an hour and if I am lucky, I get 35 
     hours a week of work. At this time, I am only getting 20 
     hours as it is ``off season'' in Stowe.

  That is a major recreation area in Vermont.

       It does not take a mathematician to do the figures. How are 
     my wife and I supposed to live on a monthly take home income 
     of less than $800. We do it by spending our hard-earned 
     retirement savings. I am 50 and my wife is 49. At the rate we 
     are going, we will be destitute in just a few years. The 
     situation is so dire that it is all that I can think about.

  Listen to this:

       Soon, I will have to start walking to work, an 8 mile round 
     trip, because the price of energy is so high it is that or go 
     without heat.

  In the United States of America, in 2008, somebody will be walking 4 
miles to work and 4 miles back. The alternative is not having enough 
money to heat their home.

       As bad as our situation is, I know many in worse shape. We 
     try to donate food when we do our weekly shopping, but now we 
     are not able to even afford to help our neighbors eat. What 
     has this country come to?

  Imagine that, having to walk 4 miles to work, and they donate food 
for other people who are worse off than they are.
  Here is one from a single mother in a small town in southern Vermont:

       I am a single mother with a 9-year-old boy. We lived this 
     past winter without any heat at all.

  In Vermont in the wintertime.

       Fortunately, someone gave me an old wood stove. I had to 
     hook it up to an old, unused chimney we had in the kitchen. I 
     couldn't even afford a chimney liner (the price of liners 
     went up with the price of fuel). To stay warm at night, my 
     son and I would pull off all the pillows from the couch and 
     pile them on the kitchen floor. I'd hang a blanket from the 
     kitchen doorway and we'd sleep right there on the floor. By 
     February, we ran out of wood and I burned my mother's dining 
     room furniture. I have no oil for hot water. We boil our 
     water on the stove and pour it in the tub. I'd like to order 
     one of your flags and hang it upside down at the capital 
     building. We are certainly a country in distress.

  This is a gentleman from another town in southern Vermont:

       I make less than $35,000 a year and work hard to earn that. 
     I am trying to get by with the rising cost of fuel. I have a 
     wife and four kids that I love dearly and am trying to do the 
     best I can for them. We do receive help from the State, but I 
     would like to be able to make it without that help.

  He would like to do it without that help.

       With the cost of gas pushing $4 a gallon and price of 
     heating oil up over $4 a gallon, it is hard to make ends 
     meet.
       On the top of that, the furnace that heats the house and 
     keeps my kids warm died today, and while it will not need to 
     run much longer this winter, the nights are still too cold 
     for a three year old, and I have next winter to look forward 
     to. I am not sure how I am going to pay for the repairs.

  Here is another from a woman from a small town in central Vermont:

       My husband and I followed all the rules. He grew up in 
     urban projects and went into the military with Vietnam 
     service so he could get GI Bill benefits and go to college. I 
     grew up picking strawberries as a migrant worker but had a 
     mother who so pressed education that I was able to go to 
     college on scholarship and by working full time nights in a 
     mental hospital. My husband and I worked hard to buy a home, 
     maintain good credit, even taking government jobs because we 
     truly wanted to help others. I became disabled and unable to 
     work, but we managed to live a middle class life on one 
     salary.

[[Page 8518]]

       Slowly, though, we have sunk back to the ``poor'' days. Our 
     heating oil bill, gas prices, food prices--well, you know the 
     story. Even a pizza is a splurge now. The interest on our 
     meager savings doesn't seem worth keeping the money in the 
     bank. We're so much more fortunate than many others, since we 
     can still meet our bills, but we're scared that we will drop 
     beneath that level soon. It doesn't seem right that after 
     working hard and following all the rules for our lives, now, 
     at 60, we're tumbling down.

  Here is an e-mail from a Vermonter from a small town near the New 
Hampshire border:

       Dear Senator Sanders: First, let me thank you for all of 
     the support and rallying behind the middle class you have 
     done. I, too, have been struggling to overcome the increasing 
     cost of gas, heating oil, food, taxes, etc. I have to say 
     that this is the toughest year, financially, that I have ever 
     experienced in my 41 years on this earth. I have what used to 
     be considered a decent job. I work hard, pinch my pennies, 
     but the pennies have all but dried up. I am thankful that my 
     employer understands that many of us cannot afford to drive 
     to work five days a week. Instead, I work three 15-hour days. 
     I have taken odd jobs to try to make ends meet.
       This winter, after keeping the heat just high enough to 
     keep my pipes from bursting (the bedrooms are not heated and 
     never got above 30 degrees), I began selling off my 
     woodworking tools, snowblower (pennies on the dollar), and 
     furniture that had been handed down in my family from the 
     early 1800s, just to keep the heat on.
       Today, I am sad, broken, and very discouraged. I am 
     thankful that the winter cold is behind us for a while, but 
     now gas prices are rising yet again. I just can't keep up.

  This is from a mother in a town near the Canadian border:

       I am a single mother of 4. Each day the struggle becomes 
     more difficult. Thank goodness for Spring. My last oil 
     delivery was $500. I spend over $200 a month on gas just 
     driving back and forth to work (approximately 300 miles a 
     week).

  Sometimes what some of my colleagues don't understand is that in 
rural parts of America, people don't walk to work, they don't take a 
car ride of 5 minutes. Sometimes people drive 50 miles to work. 
Sometimes they drive 100 miles to work. When gasoline costs $3.70 a 
gallon, every nickel of the pay raise they may have gotten goes right 
into that gas tank.

       We have cut our budget again and again. There is little 
     left to cut. Spring and Summer brings a respite from the fuel 
     bills of winter, but I worry what next winter will bring. I 
     will have to dig into my small 401(k) to make some home 
     repairs this summer. Money that had been set aside went to 
     fuel, an electric bill that increased by 14%, and food.

  I read these letters because sometimes in the middle of the debates 
we have here, everybody is spouting off all kinds of facts and figures 
and ideas. I thought it important to bring a little bit of reality of 
what is going on in middle-class Vermont. I have to say I doubt very 
much that it is any different than middle-class New Jersey or any other 
State in this country. People are hurting. Poverty is increasing. The 
middle class is collapsing. The only people in our economy who are 
doing well are the people at the very top, and they are doing extremely 
well.
  Many of the stories we have heard deal with high energy prices. I 
believe that what happened is that while the middle class has been 
shrinking for many years now, these high energy prices have resulted in 
a lot of people now dropping over the cliff. They were struggling and 
trying to keep their heads above water and, suddenly, out of nowhere, 
comes $3.70 for a gallon of gas and $4 for home heating oil. That has 
taken them over the edge.
  That is one of the reasons 82 percent of the American people think 
our country is moving in the wrong direction. What do we do? There is a 
lot we can do.
  Let me focus on energy. The good news is that today, thankfully, 97 
Senators voted to stop the Bush administration from continuing the 
absurd policy of adding 70,000 barrels of oil a day into the Strategic 
Petroleum Reserve, which is already 97 percent full. Is that going to 
result in a precipitous drop in gasoline prices? No. Will it help? Yes. 
I applaud my colleagues for doing that.
  I find it interesting that 97 of our colleagues voted for this today, 
when 2 or 3 weeks ago we were wondering whether we had the votes to get 
this through. I think many of our colleagues are hearing, when they go 
home, that people are in trouble. They are hearing the same stories I 
am hearing, and they are hearing people want them to begin to stand up 
to the Bush administration, stand up to the oil companies, stand up to 
the speculators, stand up to the people who are ripping them off while 
their lifestyle is rapidly declining.
  What we did today is a good thought, but, clearly, we have a long way 
to go. I am onboard legislation, which we discussed a little bit today, 
which demands that President Bush tell Saudi Arabia it is not 
acceptable that they have cut back on their oil production, that it is 
imperative they increase oil production so we can have more oil on the 
market, which will lower gas and oil prices.
  In addition to that, I believe the time is long overdue that we start 
dealing with the reality that OPEC is, by definition, a cartel 
designed, created to restrict trade, to collude to limit oil production 
output, and to make prices higher than they need be. We have to take a 
hard look at OPEC and begin to demand that this President go to the WTO 
and break up OPEC.
  Furthermore, it is very clear that at a time when oil prices are 
soaring, it is, in my view, absolutely necessary that we impose a 
windfall profits tax on the oil and gas industry. The American people 
do not understand why they are paying recordbreaking prices at the gas 
pump while ExxonMobil has made more profits than any company in the 
history of the world for the past 2 consecutive years.
  Last year alone, ExxonMobil made $40 billion in profits and rewarded 
its CEO with $21 million in total compensation. Just a few years ago, 
ExxonMobil gave its former CEO a $400 million retirement package--a 
$400 million retirement package and people in Vermont and all over this 
country are unable to fill up their gas tanks or heat their homes.
  But ExxonMobil is not alone. Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Shell, and BP 
have also been making out like bandits. In fact, the five largest oil 
companies in this country have made over $600 billion in profits since 
President Bush has been in office.
  Last year alone, the major oil companies in the United States made 
over $155 billion in profits. Believe it or not, these profits continue 
to soar. Recently, ExxonMobil reported a 17-percent increase in 
profits, totaling $10.9 billion. Earlier, BP announced a 63-percent 
increase in profits and on and on it goes. Every major oil company is 
seeing a significant increase in their profits. Meanwhile, what these 
big oil companies do with all their revenue is they have the capability 
of providing their CEOs with lavish compensation. In 2006, Occidental 
Petroleum gave its CEO, Ray Irani, $400 million in total compensation 
for 1 year of work.
  My friends, when you are going to fill up your gas tanks at $3.75 a 
gallon, let's remember, the gentleman who runs Occidental managed to 
survive last year on $400 million in total compensation.
  Last year, Anadarko Petroleum's CEO received $26.7 million; Chevron's 
CEO received $15.7 million; and ConocoPhillips' CEO made $15.1 million 
in total compensation.
  Let's be clear, I believe oil companies should be allowed to make 
reasonable profits, and CEOs of big oil companies should be able to 
make a reasonable compensation. But at a time when so many Americans 
are struggling to make ends meet and when people cannot afford the 
outrageously high prices they are now forced to pay, these kinds of 
executive compensations are to me totally unacceptable.
  It is not just the oil companies that are ripping off the American 
people. There is a lot of evidence, and there have been hearings held 
on this issue, that wealthy speculators and hedge fund managers have 
been making obscene amounts of money by driving up the price of oil in 
unregulated energy markets with absolutely no Government oversight. The 
top 50 hedge fund managers earned $29 billion in income last year.
  What we are seeing now is not only oil company greed driving up 
prices, but we are seeing financial institutions and hedge funds 
speculating on oil futures also driving up the price of oil.

[[Page 8519]]

This is an issue that must be dealt with in a number of ways, including 
repealing the so-called Enron loophole.
  I conclude by saying what I think the American people know. They know 
our middle class is in deep distress, that people who have worked their 
whole lives hoping to enjoy a secure retirement are not going to have 
that retirement. We have heard from young people who are very worried 
about how, if ever, they are going to be able to pay off their very 
high college loans, and we heard about other people who cannot afford 
to go to college.
  The time is very much overdue for the Congress to stop listening to 
the oil companies, the speculators, the banks, and the credit card 
companies and all these people who make huge sums of money and who pay 
their CEOs obscene compensation packages and start listening to 
ordinary Americans who, to a great degree, are not having their voices 
heard. That is what our job is. That is what we swore to do when we 
swore to uphold the Constitution. I think we swore to uphold the needs 
of the American people.
  I hope we can move forward in addressing the energy crisis short 
term. Long term, of course, we need to transform our energy system away 
from fossil fuels and foreign oil into energy efficiency and 
sustainable energy. I know you and I, Mr. President, have worked on a 
number of pieces of legislation that will move this country in that 
direction, and that is what we have to do.

                          ____________________