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NewsTranscript
00:01Thank you, Shreveport!
00:08Let me thank all of you for coming out.
00:12Let me thank Sweet Crude for the music.
00:17Conrad Cable, Yvette Fuller, Eddie Jenkins,
00:20Kate Lator, Mike Ashforth, and Gary Chambers for their remarks.
00:30And let me also thank your local congressman, Mike Johnson, for welcoming me to Shreveport.
00:44I saw a post of the billboard that the speaker put up on I-20.
00:53Yeah, I agree, the photo was not good, no question.
01:00We've got to send Mike a better photo.
01:03But in truth, he did note what I am going to talk about today.
01:09And that is this absolutely horrific piece of legislation that Johnson is pushing into Congress.
01:16And I want to say a word about why I am in Louisiana today,
01:27why I was in McAllen, Texas last night,
01:30why we're going to be in Tulsa, Oklahoma this evening,
01:33why we're going back to Texas tomorrow.
01:35tomorrow.
01:36And the reason is, I do not believe in this red state, blue state nonsense.
01:42I believe that whether you live in Louisiana or Texas or Vermont or Massachusetts,
01:56I believe that the vast majority of the American people believe in economic justice.
02:02They believe in social justice.
02:09They understand that climate change is real and a threat to humanity.
02:17They believe in racial justice and an end to bigotry in all of its forms.
02:24So our job, whether we come from a conservative state or a progressive state,
02:34is to bring our people together.
02:38And not to let people divide us up.
02:43I'm going to talk about Mr. Johnson's bill, but before I do that,
02:48I want to say a few words about where I see us as a nation today.
02:55And in that regard, I see both bad news and good news.
03:01And the bad news is, I think most Americans understand,
03:04is that as a nation today, we face more serious crises
03:11than at any time in the modern history of our nation.
03:15And I wish I could tell you that wasn't the case, but it is the case.
03:19That's the bad news.
03:21The good news is that all over America, people are standing up,
03:26and your presence here today is part of that, standing up and fighting back.
03:32Our fighting oligarchy tour, which has now done 20 events in 14 states,
03:49has brought out over 260,000 Americans.
03:55And those are Democrats, Republicans, and Independents coming together.
04:10And just last weekend, on Saturday, there were No King rallies.
04:16You all know the No King rallies?
04:18You had one here in Shrevewood, I understand.
04:23Well, we had about 40 of them all over the state of Vermont.
04:28And what people are saying, loudly and clearly,
04:33is no to oligarchy, no to a government of the billionaire class,
04:45no to authoritarianism and a president,
04:52who clearly has not read or understood what the Constitution of the United States is about.
05:04No to kleptocracy and a president who is going to make hundreds of millions of dollars off of his role as president.
05:19And no to Speaker Johnson's bill, which gives massive tax breaks to billionaires.
05:34So let me spend a moment talking about stuff that you don't see much about on TV,
05:42or read about in the papers, or hear much about in Congress.
05:47And that is that right now, in an unprecedented way,
05:52we as Americans are living in an oligarchic form of society.
05:59And what that means is that right now, no one disputes this,
06:04we have more income and wealth inequality in America today
06:10than we have ever had in the history of this country.
06:17You have one person, I mean, let me tell you how absurd it is.
06:22And you don't hear it discussed in Congress much, some of us do, but not many.
06:27You don't hear it discussed on the media.
06:29You've got one guy, one person, Mr. Musk.
06:32You heard of Mr. Musk?
06:37This guy, one person, owns more wealth than the bottom 52% of American households.
06:45You got that?
06:49There is nobody in this country who thinks that that is appropriate.
06:53You got in America today, the top 1%, owning more wealth than the bottom 93%.
07:01You have the CEOs of large corporations now making 350 times more than their average worker.
07:14But it is not, when we talk about the economy, it's not just income and wealth inequality.
07:23It is a nation in which we have more concentration of ownership than we have ever had in our history.
07:32No matter what the sector may be, whether it's agriculture, transportation, financial services,
07:38healthcare, big tech, media, what you have is fewer and fewer very large corporations controlling what is produced
07:47and the prices we pay when we go into a grocery store or wherever.
07:54So you have more concentration of ownership than ever before.
07:59And you add all of that together, huge corporate profits, rich getting richer,
08:05what we have now is a society of, in a sense, two nations.
08:10In one sense, you have the people on top doing phenomenally well, never have done better.
08:18But there is another reality, and that is that while the richest people are doing phenomenally well,
08:29working class people are struggling to put food on the table, struggling to pay their health care bills,
08:42and struggling to find affordable housing.
08:47But when you talk about the economy, and you talk about wealth in this country,
08:52I want everybody to understand, again, a very important point that is almost never discussed.
08:58It's not just that the rich have enormous economic power.
09:02They do, unprecedented.
09:04They have enormous political power.
09:09So let me be as clear as I can be.
09:14We are living now under a corrupt campaign finance system.
09:20Fifteen years ago or so, the Supreme Court, in a disastrous decision called Citizens United,
09:37essentially said that billionaires can spend as much money as they want to buy and sell politicians.
09:48And that is exactly what is going on today.
09:52If you want to know how come Elon Musk became the most powerful man in government,
10:00running all over, throwing thousands of federal workers out on the street,
10:05running to dismantle the Social Security Administration, proposing to throw 83,000 employees of the Veterans Administration out on the street.
10:19I will tell you how Elon Musk got that job.
10:26He contributed $270 million to get Trump elected.
10:32That is obscene.
10:37And I'll tell you something else.
10:40That right now, as we debate, and the Johnson bill is coming to the Senate literally in a few days.
10:48And as we debate that bill, if you think there is a member of the House of Representatives, a Republican member,
10:56who is prepared to stand up against this bill without knowing that if this guy stands up and he says,
11:03you know what, I represent the low-income district, I don't think cutting Medicaid is a good idea to give tax breaks to the rich.
11:10You know what happens to that guy?
11:12On the next day, Mr. Musk says, we are going to primary you.
11:17You are out of here.
11:19I own the system.
11:21You cannot defy what we want.
11:23That's the Republicans.
11:25And the Democrats also have billionaires controlling what goes on in that party.
11:32So it's not just Republicans.
11:35And I will give you an example.
11:37And some of you will agree with me, and that's fine.
11:40I happen to be a believer in democracy.
11:43I think that's a pretty good idea.
11:45And unlike Republican leadership, I don't think everybody has to agree with everything I say.
11:55But I'll give you an example of something I feel very strongly about.
11:58I brought forth several what's called joint resolutions of disapproval.
12:04And what those are, and what I was trying to do, was to end U.S. military aid to the Netanyahu government in Israel.
12:16And the reason I did that is that right now what's going on in Gaza is unspeakable.
12:41And children, children are starving.
12:47People are being shot in cold blood.
12:49But my point here, my point is, my point is, on that resolution calling for cessation of military aid to Netanyahu's government, I got 15 votes.
13:0215.
13:03Now, why did I get 15 votes?
13:05Do you think it's because other Democrats and Republicans are not concerned and not understanding of what's going on there?
13:13They do.
13:14They are afraid of super PACs like AIPAC and other PACs.
13:19And understand that if they stand up, they're going to get primaries.
13:24I'll give you another example.
13:25And again, I don't know how people in this room feel.
13:28I think it would be a disaster for the United States to get involved right now with Israel in a war against Iran.
13:39And I remember, I remember, I remember all of the political rhetoric that was going on regarding the
14:08need to get us into the war in Iraq.
14:13Oh, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
14:17Terrible, terrible.
14:18It turned out we got involved in that terrible war.
14:22And I went to too many funerals in Vermont, which I'll never forget.
14:26Young people.
14:27Young people died in that war.
14:30All over the country.
14:31We lost approximately 4,500 young men, women.
14:3632,000 were wounded.
14:39Now, it seems to me that God only knows that we have enough problems right here in the United States to address.
14:45We don't need to spend billions more getting involved in a war in Iran.
14:49But I raise those points not just to talk about Gaza or Iran, but to talk about the power of money in our political process.
15:09And that is why the most important political issue that we must deal with as a nation is getting rid of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision.
15:30And moving to public funding of elections.
15:35In other words, you want to run for office, and I hope some of you will.
15:40You should not have to beg rich people for campaign contributions.
15:45Today, in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, there is a reality going on that, again, gets very little discussion.
16:03And that has to do with who owns the media, et cetera.
16:06But what's going on is that 60%, 6-0% of our people are living paycheck to paycheck.
16:17You all know what that means, living paycheck to paycheck?
16:21I fear that many of you do.
16:25And I grew up in a family that lived paycheck to paycheck, and that is a life and a childhood that I will never forget.
16:35And that has greatly impacted my political views.
16:38And what paycheck to paycheck means, as you know, is there are people waking up today worrying about how they're going to feed their kids.
16:46They're worrying about what happens if the landlord raises rent.
16:50How am I going to pay for that?
16:51They worry about somebody in the family gets sick.
16:54I can't afford to take the kid, my parent, to the doctor.
16:57We just don't have the money.
16:59Talk about, you know, what happens if my car breaks down?
17:03I can't get to work, right?
17:05A thousand dollar bill, they got my car repaired.
17:07If I can't get it repaired, I can't get to work.
17:09If I can't get to work, I'll get fired.
17:10What happens to my family?
17:12That's what living paycheck to paycheck is about.
17:15And we don't talk about that much in America.
17:18And I was recently talking to some Europeans, and I asked them about that.
17:21They had no clue how many people in this country are struggling every day just to survive.
17:28So what we have got to understand is that we need in this country an agenda that works for working families, not just the billionaire class.
17:47And I'll tell you why.
17:58Today in America, and I want you to hear this again because it is not talked about much.
18:04Remember, richest country in the history of the world, half of older workers in America have nothing in the bank as they face retirement.
18:15Got that?
18:1722% of seniors are trying to live now on $15,000 a year or less.
18:27Anybody here know how somebody can survive on $15,000 a year?
18:34You can.
18:35I don't care where you live.
18:3785 million Americans in the richest country on earth are either uninsured or underinsured.
18:46We have, as a nation, the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any nation on earth.
18:55We got 800,000 Americans who are homeless and over 20 million households that are spending 50% or more of their incomes on housing.
19:11You got millions of kids who can't afford to go to college and you got a childcare system which is broken at a time when in many cases both mom and dad are working.
19:23And then on top of all of that, there's another reality.
19:28And I think it tells you why people in America are angry.
19:33All of you know and understand that over the last 50 years, 5-0 years, technology has exploded and there has been a huge increase in worker productivity, right?
19:48Every worker in this room now produces a lot more than somebody doing similar work 50 years ago.
19:56One might expect that given the reality that workers today are far more productive, producing a lot more than used to be the case,
20:04they must be making a lot more money than the men and women who did those jobs 50 years ago, right?
20:11Well, here's the fact.
20:14The fact is that in inflation accounted for weekly wages, they are lower today than they were 52 years ago.
20:31So people are sitting there saying, we're working, I'm producing more, I'm going nowhere in a hurry.
20:37And everything being equal, if we don't change it, our kids in Vermont, in Louisiana are going to have a lower standard of living than we do.
20:49All of this taking place in the richest country in the history of the world.
20:55And during, and it's important to know this, during that same 50-year period, there was a $79 trillion transfer of wealth that went from the bottom 90% to the top 1%.
21:18So what you got? You got a society which, if you add it all together, is phenomenally rich, but the people on top have virtually all of it.
21:26And they are getting richer and richer while working class people struggle.
21:31This will shock some of the younger people here.
21:33All right, but you got to believe me that this is true.
21:36Hard to believe.
21:37When I was a kid several hundred years ago, and I grew up in a working class family,
21:43in those days, one person in a home, in those days mostly the man, could earn enough money to pay the bills for the family.
21:53Got it? One person.
21:55How many working class families do you know where both mom and dad are not working?
22:00Not many, correct?
22:02All right, that's the reality.
22:04And now let me get, now let me get to Mr. Johnson's bill.
22:15Because at a time when so many of our people cannot afford health care,
22:21when families are struggling to put food on the table,
22:24and we have kids in Louisiana and Vermont who are hungry, kids can't afford to go to college,
22:30Mr. Johnson's bill does virtually everything wrong.
22:36But let me say a word about what the bill is not about.
22:41Mr. Johnson in his billboard said that people like me want to raise taxes on working class families.
22:49And that is absolutely untrue.
22:52Nobody in Congress, nobody believes that we should not reauthorize the tax revisions
22:59that protect working class families.
23:01That's a BOGA issues.
23:03But let me tell you what this bill does do.
23:07This bill, at a time of massive income and wealth inequality,
23:12when the billionaires have never had it so good,
23:14it would provide a $650 billion tax break to the top 1%.
23:22So all of the billionaires in this room, and I know there are many,
23:29good times are coming for you, you're getting a big tax break.
23:35This bill would also, which I provide just unbelievable, provide a $230 billion tax break to the top 2 tenths of 1%.
23:49It's not even a 1%, 2 tenths, by expanding in the estate tax, the exemptions for very, very rich families.
24:00This legislation that Mr. Johnson is pushing would provide a tax break of more than $400 billion to large corporations.
24:10And by the way, one of the things this tax break does is it incentivizes these companies to make investment in new technology,
24:21i.e. robotics and artificial intelligence, which are going to throw you out on the street.
24:27And how are they going to pay for all of these tax breaks for the rich and large corporations?
24:40Well, I will tell you.
24:42Johnson's legislation cuts Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act by over $1 trillion.
24:49The Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan institution, has estimated that at the moment when 85 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured,
25:07this bill would end health insurance for 16 million more Americans.
25:18So in other words, instead of dealing with the health care crisis, making sure that all of our people have health insurance,
25:25lowering the cost, this makes a terrible situation even worse.
25:31This bill for the first time forces millions of Medicaid recipients who make as little as $16,000 a year to pay a co-payment of $35
25:44every time they visit a doctor when they get sick.
25:50And there are people who have studied the implications of what all this means.
25:54What does it mean?
25:55You throw 16 million people off of the health care they have, you impose a $35 co-payment.
26:03Well, Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania did a study on this.
26:08And it is really quite shocking.
26:10They estimated that if this reconciliation bill is enacted, over 50,000 Americans will die unnecessarily each and every year.
26:23And it is not hard to understand why.
26:29If people don't have access to health care, low income, working class people, they can't get to a doctor when they need to,
26:37they will suffer and tens of thousands will die.
26:41But I also want to tell you that we're talking about Medicaid cuts, it impacts more than the 16 million individuals.
26:49Nursing homes are largely dependent on Medicaid community health centers, largely dependent on Medicaid hospitals,
26:59largely dependent on Medicaid rural hospitals, which are shutting down all over the place,
27:06will be devastated by this terrible piece of legislation.
27:12But don't take my word for it.
27:16The Republican President of the State Senate, right here in Louisiana,
27:21recently said that if this reconciliation bill is signed into law,
27:25the state legislature would have to immediately go into a special session
27:30because this state could not afford the massive cuts to Louisiana's hospitals, health care systems, and state budget.
27:39That is the Republican President of the Louisiana State Senate.
27:45But it is not in this legislation, just our health care system, that would be devastated.
27:52This bill would cut $290 billion from nutrition programs.
28:00Now, we've got hungry kids in Vermont, you've got hungry kids in Louisiana,
28:07dependent on school breakfast programs, school lunch programs.
28:11You've got programs like Meals on Wheels, which do a phenomenal job in Vermont,
28:16and I expect here as well, right?
28:18All over the country.
28:23But you're going to see nutrition programs cut for kids, for elderly people,
28:31so that billionaires can get a huge tax break.
28:36This bill would slash education funding by $350 billion.
28:44All over this country, many kids, working class kids, want a higher education.
28:49They want to go to college.
28:50They want to go to a trade school.
28:52This bill would make it much, much harder to do that.
28:57A few weeks ago, Speaker Johnson said that there was a, quote-unquote,
29:02a moral component to this reconciliation bill.
29:07Now, I don't know that there is any religion on earth that believes it's appropriate
29:17that you take away health care from people who desperately need it.
29:22I don't know that there is any religion on earth that says you take away health care from people who desperately need it.
29:40In my view, as a nation, it is imperative that not just we beat this bill, and I'm going to work as hard as I can next week and in the coming weeks,
29:53but it is equally important that we develop and fight for a new vision of what America needs.
30:12America could be.
30:24You see, what the establishment wants to tell you in so many words is, you know, well, I'm sorry about it.
30:36You know, we're a poor country.
30:37We're a struggling country.
30:38Sorry I have to throw you off health care.
30:40Sorry I have to deny food for your kids.
30:43Sorry we can't do anything about the housing crisis that exists all over the country.
30:47We just don't have the money to do it.
30:49And we have got to respond by saying sorry.
30:53This is the richest country in the history of the world.
30:57There is nothing that we cannot accomplish.
31:00In my view, and as part of the fight against income and wealth inequality, we should not be supporting tax breaks for the rich.
31:21We should be demanding that the billionaires start paying their fair share of taxes.
31:26Brothers and sisters, instead of throwing 16 million people off of health care,
31:46we should understand that health care is a human right guarantee.
31:51health care to every man, woman and child.
31:56And again, what I want to tell you, and the media doesn't do much on this, this is not a radical idea.
32:16Does everybody in this auditorium understand that we are the only major country on earth not to guarantee health care to all people?
32:29I live in Vermont, 50 miles away from the Canadian border.
32:39They spend 50% of what we do per person on health care.
32:45Somehow they manage to provide quality care to all of their people.
32:50You get sick and you end up in a hospital for a month, there is a zero bill.
32:56The function of a rational health care system is not simply to make the drug companies and the insurance companies richer and richer.
33:13It's to provide quality care for all.
33:15Let us fight for a Medicare for all single-payer program.
33:27There are people in the Senate, some Republicans, who are talking about cutting Social Security, raising the retirement age or whatever.
33:36You know, it is seniors who built this country, seniors who fought in the wars to defend this country.
33:51And in their last years, you don't cut Social Security, we expand Social Security benefits.
34:01And you do that by lifting the cap on taxable income so that billionaires start paying their fair share into the system.
34:16And instead of throwing people off of health care or denying food to hungry kids, maybe we address the housing crisis in America.
34:28And build the millions of low-income and affordable housing units that we desperately need.
34:35Maybe in a competitive global economy, instead of making it harder for kids to get a higher education, we make public colleges and universities tuition free.
34:51Young people should not be forced to go $50,000 or $100,000 in debt because they wanted a higher education.
35:12We need, in this country, we desperately need more doctors and nurses and mental health counselors and dentists.
35:21Do you know how much, if you're a working class person and you graduate medical school, do you know what your debt is likely to be?
35:28Anyone know?
35:30$500,000.
35:33$500,000.
35:34Insane.
35:35We want to encourage our young people to be doctors and nurses, not to have to go deeply in debt to do that.
35:49And yes, we understand that we can create millions of good-paying union jobs by addressing the existential threat of climate change.
36:08And when some of my colleagues in the Congress talk about freedom, they love freedom, well, in my view,
36:21freedom means that every woman in America has the right to control her own body.
36:50Look, these are tough times.
36:55And I think that in this moment, especially this moment in American history, despair is not an option.
37:03Giving up and hiding under the covers is not acceptable.
37:10Because what we are dealing with is not just stuff that will impact our lives.
37:16What we are dealing with is what will happen to our kids and future generations.
37:23And let us never forget, real, real change never takes place from the top on down.
37:38It is always from the bottom on up.
37:42Real change takes place when millions of ordinary people stand up and say, you know what, the status quo is not working.
37:57And they band together and they take on powerful special interests.
38:03This is what happened way back in 1776.
38:09When people in America said, we are tired of being ruled by a despot, it happened in the 1840s when abolitionists said, slavery is abominable, not acceptable.
38:27It happened in the 1920s and 1930s when workers said, we are sick and tired of being exploited, we are going to stand together and build a strong trade union movement.
38:55It happened in the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the environmental movement, the gay movement.
39:15So the truth is, yes, the oligarchs are enormously powerful.
39:21They have unlimited, and underline the word, unlimited amounts of money.
39:27They have enormous power.
39:30They control our economy.
39:33They own much of the medium.
39:35And they have, as I mentioned, enormous power over both major political parties.
39:41But from the bottom of my heart, I am convinced that if we stand together, we can beat them.
39:51Now their strategy, their strategy is what demagogues always do.
40:13You pick on a group of people who don't have a lot of power, and you say that group of people, whether it's blacks or gays or Jews or gypsies, whoever it may, undocumented people in the sky.
40:25That's the cause of all your problems.
40:27And we've got to get divided up based on the color of our skin or where we were born or our sexual orientation.
40:35If we discard all of that stuff and understand, yeah, we have our differences.
40:40People in Vermont will disagree with people in Louisiana on issues. Occasionally.
40:45Or more than occasionally.
40:48But the bottom line, we are Americans who believe in justice.
40:53So let us stand together.
41:06Let us not allow them to divide us up.
41:11Let's go forward.
41:12Let's transform our country.
41:14Thank you all very much.
41:16Thank you, Chief Warwick.
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