Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has formally joined the 2016 Democratic presidential race, hoping to start “a political revolution to transform our country economically, politically, socially and environmentally”.
Sanders, a political gadfly who rose to become mayor of Burlington, made his announcement on Tuesday on the Lake Champlain waterfront that had been one of the jewels of that tenure. Before he took the stage, friends and political allies told a crowd of thousands that Sanders had saved the park from being turned into condos.
“The lesson to be learned is that when people stand together, and are prepared to fight back, there is nothing that can’t be accomplished,” said Sanders.
Supports cheer while Senate Bernie Sanders speaks in Burlington, Vermont. Photo: APOther Sanders supporters, such as environmentalist Bill McKibben, talked about his 16 years in the House of Representatives and nine years in the Senate, as an outspoken “Democratic socialist” who “means what he says”.
Ice cream moguls Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield compared their underdog battle against Pillsbury to the challenge Sanders would face as a populist insurgent candidate. “There is something profoundly wrong when one family owns more wealth than the bottom 130 million Americans,” Sanders said. “This grotesque level of inequality is immoral. It is bad economics. It is unsustainable.
“This type of rigged economy is not what America is supposed to be about. This has got to change and, as your president, together we will change it.”
Climate change, he said, “is caused by human activity, and it is already causing devastating problems in the United States and around the world.”
America’s health insurance market needed to be supplanted by “a Medicare-for-all single payer system”. The wealthiest Americans needed to pay higher taxes; Wall Street needs to be reformed. “If a bank is too big to fail, it is too big to exist,” Sanders said.
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