Sanders: Freedom means economic security

In 1944, in his State of the Union speech, President Roosevelt outlined what he called a second Bill of Rights. He tells me that he has never been involved in politics until Bernie Sanders launched a big for presidency.

Though Sanders may not win this race, but yesterday was a reminder of why his voice is so desperately needed.

Bernie Sanders reiterated his campaign theme again today at Georgetown University. Still, gray skies weren’t much of a deterrent. When that happens everything that I talk about will be passed.

Read Senator Sanders entire speech here. (“I heard that people showed up at 3 a.m.to see Hillary [Clinton] past year”, he said in an apparent indicator of the seriousness of the situation.) Mesa arrived with his friends at around 5:45 a.m., landing the first place in line. He noted the Central Intelligence Agency, Department of Defense, and other countries around the world acknowledge that extreme weather events can lead to migration and increase competition for limited natural resources, which in turn can lead to conflict.

While waiting for the speech to start, students wondered aloud why the senator settled on Georgetown to deliver what could be called a socialist manifesto.

“The word “revolution” scares my mother because she thinks of the Cold War, communism, Stalin”, said Matthew Collura, a 24-year-old organizer for the grassroots group Millennials for Bernie. The fact that Sanders goes out of his way to explain that he would do none of these things proves that he is more of a “trendy” socialist than a democratic one.

According to The Atlantic, Sanders wanted to praise Pope Francis for offering up critiques of unrestrained capitalism, and made sure to mention the pontiff on Thursday. “We must not accept a nation in which billionaires compete as to the size of their super-yachts, while children in America go hungry and veterans sleep out on the streets”, he said.

The campaign says it’s still working on the numbers, but there are a few hints as to how Sanders would ultimately pay for much of his welfare program in his past legislative dealings: payroll taxes (sometimes as high as 6%) and an across-the-board income tax raises (2.2%).

Sanders, who throughout his campaign has emphasized how crucial grassroots political engagement will be in order to get him elected, closed his speech Thursday acknowledging the “significant alimentation from the political process” many Americans feel, and appealed to the students in the audience.

“I don’t believe in special treatment for the top 1 percent, but I do believe in equal treatment for African-Americans, who are right to proclaim the moral principle that black lives matter”, Sanders said, drawing huge applause for his use of a popular phrase denouncing police violence and social indifference to the needs of black people.

“Democratic socialism means that we must create an economy that works for all, not just the very wealthy”, Sanders said. The message was clear: Yes, he is a democratic socialist, and you should be, too.

“True freedom does not occur without economic security.”

“It is a vision that we have not yet achieved, and it is time that we did”, Sanders said. The Sanders campaign is pretty confident both publicly and privately that “democratic socialism” can be easily turned into an asset. In June, a Gallup survey found that 50 percent of voters would not vote for a socialist, even if that candidate was generally well-qualified and had the backing of their party. Sanders’ asks for reforms that many European democracies have accomplished. “I don’t want to be cynical, but I want to be realistic”. Will Sanders draw the heir apparent, Hillary Clinton, further Left during their battle for the Democrat nomination? Our economy has been steadily deregulated since the 1980s, when neoliberalism first triumphed under President Reagan. “But we are not Denmark …”

So he ran through the usual litany of economic woes facing the United States making it sound as though the two terms of Barrack Obama have been nearly as bad for the common man and woman as the one term of Herbert Hoover.

It won’t be easy for Sanders to reclaim a word so long reviled in American culture. Distancing himself from the “radical” label often applied to self-described socialists in the United States, Sanders instead placed himself in a left-wing American tradition that includes President Franklin Roosevelt and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. “So this speech seems like a smart, strategic political move, but I don’t know if it will catch on”.