What the American people want to see in their president is somebody who not necessarily can win every fight, but they want to see him stand up and fight for what he believes, take his case to the American people.
— Bernie Sanders
It is incomprehensible that drug companies still get away with charging Americans twice as much, or more, than citizens of Canada or Europe for the exact same drugs manufactured by the exact same companies.
Here is what the practical impact of Citizens United means. What Citizens United means is that corporations call hundreds of millions of dollars into television ads, radio ads, and other forms of advertising to defeat those candidates who stand up and take them on.
I am sure that there are some single payer advocates who think the only thing worth fighting for is single payer.
I'm not a Democrat, I'm an Independent, but I caucus with the Democrats.
For better or worse, when Sen. Inhofe speaks, the Republican Party follows. And when the Republican Party follows, it is impossible to get real work done in the Congress.
Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit.
Who do you think controls the Republican Party? Big money controls the Republican Party. This is where their campaign contributions come from.
To be honest with you, I worry about concentration of ownership in media, where you have a handful of media conglomerates largely controlling what we see, hear and read.
If you look at the newspapers here - the Washington papers - most of the discussion deals with campaign gossip.
In any democratic, civilized - even non-democratic nations, if you are a nation, it means to say that in our case, if there's a hurricane in Louisiana, the people of Vermont are there for them. If there's a tornado in the Midwest, we are there for them. If there's flooding in the East Coast, the people in California are there for us.
In Vermont, Governor Madeleine Kunin has given years of service to our state after becoming the state's first female governor in 1985. She is an inspiration to girls throughout Vermont and the country in allowing them to know that the opportunities they have are unlimited.
The Federal Reserve has a responsibility to ensure the safety and soundness of financial institutions and to contain systemic risks in financial markets.
If a financial institution is too big to fail, it is too big to exist.
Establishing a 0.03 percent Wall Street speculation fee, similar to what we had from 1914-1966, would dampen the dangerous level of speculation and gambling on Wall Street, encourage the financial sector to invest in the productive economy and reduce the deficit by more than $350 billion over 10 years.
You go to Scandinavia, and you will find that people have a much higher standard of living, in terms of education, health care and decent paying jobs.
What some of us believe is that it is possible that if chemicals are related to Gulf War illness that some of the more severe symptoms may not erupt until 10 or 20 years down the line.
What Wall Street and credit card companies are doing is really not much different from what gangsters and loan sharks do who make predatory loans. While the bankers wear three-piece suits and don't break the knee caps of those who can't pay back, they still are destroying people's lives.
Of course the Republicans have long wanted to privatize Social Security and destroy it. But Social Security has been the most important and valuable social program in the history of the United States.
There is nobody that I know who believes that Bank of America is a human being who should be entitled for the same constitutional rights that the people of our country are.
If the goal of health-care reform is to provide comprehensive, universal health care in a cost-effective way, the only honest approach is a single-payer approach.
As a single-payer advocate, I believe that at the end of the day, if a state goes forward and passed an effective single-payer program, it will demonstrate that you can provide quality health care to every man, woman and child in a more cost-effective way.
The bottom line is that when Senator Inhofe says, 'Global warming is a hoax,' he is just dead wrong, according to the vast majority of climate scientists.
Social Security is a promise that we cannot and must not break.
The Fed has got to become a more democratic institution that is responsive to the needs of the middle class, not just Wall Street CEOs.
There are a lot of smart honest, progressive people who I think can be good presidents.
I think the overwhelming majority of the American people know that we have got to stand together, that we're going to grow together, that we're going to survive together, and that if we start splintering, we're not going to succeed in a highly competitive international economy.
Let us wage a moral and political war against war itself, so that we can cut military spending and use that money for human needs.
In my view, a corporation is not a person. A corporation does not have First Amendment rights to spend as much money as it wants, without disclosure, on a political campaign.
After all, Wall Street is clearly the most powerful lobbying force on Capitol Hill. From 1998 through 2008, the financial sector spent over $5 billion in lobbying and campaign contributions to deregulate Wall Street.
The Occupy Wall Street protests are shining a national spotlight on the most powerful, dangerous and secretive economic and political force in America.
We need an energy revolution by breaking our dependence on fossil fuels, polluting fuels... I am very, very confident our small state will lead this. We will be noticed by the country and the world.
I think it makes people in the Pentagon kind of nervous to know that chemical agents and environmental factors could cause so much damage in terms of what may happen in the future.
Finland is no utopia.
The goal of real healthcare reform must be high-quality, universal coverage in a cost-effective way.
I thought the Bush economic policy was a disaster. We lost 500,000 private sector jobs during his tenure.
I think the American people in many cases want to transform our energy system.
I don't consider myself a pariah.
I come from a rural state. People drive 50, 100 miles to and from work every single day. That is true all over America.
CEOs of large corporations earn 400 times what their workers make. That is not what America is supposed to be about.
You've got the top 400 Americans owning more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans. Most folks do not think that is right.
Two-thirds of the directors at the New York Fed are hand-picked by the same bankers that the Fed is in charge of regulating.
Washington is dominated by big money.
These are the same people who believe, in some cases, the federal government should not play any role in providing health care to our people or protecting the environment.
Let us wage a moral and political war against the billionaires and corporate leaders, on Wall Street and elsewhere, whose policies and greed are destroying the middle class of America.
The U.S. constitution is an extraordinary document. In my view, it should not be amended often.
The Federal Reserve needs to provide small businesses in America with the same low-interest loans it gave to foreign banks.
Do the elected officials in Washington stand with ordinary Americans - working families, children, the elderly, the poor - or will the extraordinary power of billionaire campaign contributors and Big Money prevail? The American people, by the millions, must send Congress the answer to that question.
At the current $5.15 an hour, the federal minimum wage has become a poverty wage. A full-time worker with one child lives below the official poverty line.
We still have people in the active duty, and if people are feeling ill, if they're experiencing various symptoms and they're still in the active duty, they're less likely to come forward because that could result in their medical discharge.
