Political Quotes

“about a month ago on my Web site, which is sanders.senate.gov, I requested that Vermonters e-mail me about what the collapse of the middle class means to them personally--not in esoteric economic terms but in a sense of what they are going through. Frankly, we are a small State, and our people are pretty reticent. People in Vermont don't like to open up and tell everybody all of the problems they have. They try to keep it to themselves. We expected that we would receive perhaps a few dozen replies. In fact, over the last month, we have received some 700 e-mails that came into my office talking about how people in the middle class today are trying desperately to survive. About 90 percent of the e-mails came from the State of Vermont. We have had a number from around the rest of the country. I sometimes think that many of our colleagues here really don't have much of a clue about what is going on in the real world. It is no great secret that the Halls of Congress are filled with lobbyists who make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year representing the energy companies, the coal companies, the oil companies, the drug companies, the insurance companies, the banks, and the credit card companies. They are all over the place, and they try to influence--and are successful in many instances--in influencing Congress to pass legislation that protects the interests of multinational corporations or the wealthiest people in this country.”