Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders let loose on the Republicans for their selective amnesia at the Jefferson Jackson Dinner in Iowa this Saturday:
Sanders took to the stage to remind the crowd that so-called fiscally conservative Republicans ran up the deficit, and that before President Obama took office, the global financial system was “on the verge of collapse” and hundreds of thousands of people were losing their jobs each month.
“They suffer from amnesia,” Sanders said. “They forgot what the world looked like seven years ago. They forgot that 800,000 people a month were losing their jobs. They forgot that the world’s financial system was on the verge of collapse. And they just forgot that we ran up the largest deficit in the history of the United States in the last year of George Bush.”
He also bashed Citizens United, a controversial Supreme Court decision that allows the wealthiest to donate unlimited amounts of money to political campaigns.
“Republicans said you can’t win a campaign… unless you go to the millionaires and billionaires and you beg for money,” Sanders said, noting he raised all his money via individual donations from people giving about $30 each. “I’m the only Democratic candidate for president who does not have a SuperPAC, and we are going to prove the experts wrong because we’re gonna win this campaign.”
Sanders called for a living wage to be the minimum wage, and pay equality for women. He also called for investment in jobs and education, instead of jails and incarceration.
“We have more people in jail than any other country on Earth, disproportionately black and Latino,” he pointed out, and also called out income inequality.
“When you see that the United States has more income and wealth inequality than any other major country on earth, and you see all the new income is going to the top 1 percent, you know and the American people know that that is not moral, not sustainable, and you demand that the wealthiest people in the country and the largest corporations start paying their fair share of taxes.”
