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Super PACs and a corrupt campaign finance system are destroying American democracy. We're proud that we have received four million individual contributions, more than any candidate in American history at this point.
After all, Wall Street is clearly the most powerful lobbying force on Capitol Hill. From 1998 through 2008, the financial sector spent over $5 billion in lobbying and campaign contributions to deregulate Wall Street.
The details of what the Fed did were kept secret until a provision in the Dodd-Frank Act that I sponsored required the Government Accountability Office to audit the Fed's lending programs during the financial crisis.
We are spending hundreds of billions of dollars maintaining 5,000 nuclear weapons. I think we need major reform in the military, making it more cost effective, but also focusing on the real crisis that faces America.
In 49 countries around the world, including all of Europe, people have the opportunity of knowing whether or not they are eating food which contains genetically engineered ingredients. In the United States, we don't.
Even the alternative weekly newspapers, traditionally a bastion of progressive thought and analysis, have been bought by a monopoly franchise and made a predictable shift to the right in their coverage of local news.
Denmark is a small, homogenous nation of about 5.5 million people. The United States is a melting pot of more than 315 million people. No question about it, Denmark and the United States are very different countries.
I was elected by the Democrats to be chair of the Veterans Committee, which I'm very proud of. And now am the rankings member on the Budget Committee, leader of the Democrats in opposition to the majority Republicans.
If you`re a Republican politician and you`re seeing this guy [Donald Trump] saying crazy stuff and going up in the polls, what are you going to say, you`re going to say equally crazy or maybe a little less crazy stuff.
...Poverty in America today leads not only to anxiety, unhappiness, discomfort and a lack of material goods. It leads to death. Poverty in America today is a death sentence for tens and tens of thousands of our people.
I do not accept the belief that the United States of America and our government can't stand up to the ripoffs of the pharmaceutical industry which charge us by far the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs.
It used to be that I was known as 'the longest-serving independent in the history of the United States Congress,' which is true. Now I'm a 'self-professed democratic socialist.' Things change when you run for president.
I believe that climate change is the great global crisis that we face, environmental crisis. I believe that if you're serious about climate change, you don't encourage the excavation and transportation of very dirty oil.
While commentators on Fox and right-wing radio have the backing of Rupert Murdoch, a major Republican contributor, and other conservative corporations, progressives understand that their position is extremely vulnerable.
I did work with John McCain. I did work with Jeff Miller over in the House. And we put together not the bill that I wanted, but probably the most comprehensive V.A. health care bill in the modern history of this country.
I am going to work with people who hold similar views to me inside Congress, outside of Congress to make certain that we come together to stop Trump from doing some of the very ugly things that he has talked about doing.
It is beyond my comprehension why today in America, hundreds of thousands of bright young people are unable to go to college - for one reason: that their family lacks the funding. And together we are going to change that.
The good news is that the American people, not just the African-American community are saying enough is enough. You can`t hold people in custody and suddenly find out that they are dead. You can`t shoot people in the back.
If you want to talk about somebody who's actually been tough on Russia, look at President Trump. He wants more fracking, more coal, more energy, a stronger military, a stronger defense. Those things aren't good for Russia.
Democracy is one person, one vote and a full discussion of the issues that affect us. Oligarchy is billionaires buying elections, voter suppression and a concentrated corporate media determining what we see, hear and read.
I did a lot of reading. I read about democratic socialism. And I read about the efforts of people for such a long time trying to create a society in which all people can live with dignity. And that's kind of what I believe.
Most of us have not heard about Master Limited Partnerships. These special financing arrangements allow oil and gas investors to avoid paying certain corporate income taxes, but are not available to clean energy businesses.
What every American should know is that we have more people in jail today than any other country on Earth, more than China. We have some 2.2 million people in jail. What that means is that a lot of lives are being destroyed.
There are very powerful and wealthy special interests who want to privatize or dismember virtually every function that government now performs, whether it is Social Security, Medicare, public education or the Postal Service.
The Koch brothers, through the expenditure of billions of dollars and the creation and support of dozens of extreme right organizations, have taken fringe extremist ideas and made them mainstream within the Republican Party.
Progressives know there is something very wrong when a nation divided politically has one major network operating as a propaganda arm of the Republican Party and 90 percent of talk radio is dominated by right-wing extremists.
I don't believe in trashing my opponents. I've never run a negative ad in my life. I believe in talking about issues, sometimes fighting for the media to talk about the issues, but that's what I do, and the people will decide.
I am very glad, Anderson, that secretary Clinton discovered religion on this issue but it's a little bit too late. Secretary Clinton supported virtually every one of the disastrous trade agreements written by corporate America.
At a time when our planet is warming due to climate change, the last thing our environment needs is more drilling. What we need is for Congress and the White House to move toward clean energy such as solar, wind and geothermal.
I have known Hillary Clinton for 25 years. I remember her, as you do, as a great first lady who broke precedent in terms of the role that a first lady was supposed to play as she helped lead the fight for universal health care.
When Hillary Clinton ran against Senator [Barack] Obama she thought him naive because he thought it was a good idea to talk to our enemies. I think those are exactly the people you have to talk to and you have to negotiate with.
Wish we could, and allow the Taliban or anybody else to reclaim that country. But what we must do is some progress in Iraq, where finally the Iraqi army, which has not been a particularly effective fighting force, retook Ramadi.
We are looking at a lot of dishonest news that comes across where people are lying outrageously about other people. And I hope that folks on all sides could say, "Look, I disagree with him or her, but that is an outrageous lie."
Experience is not the only point, judgment is. And once again, back in 2002, when we both [with Hillary Clinton] looked at the same evidence about the wisdom of the war in Iraq, one of us voted the right way and one of us didn't.
Freedom of speech, the right to dissent, the right to protest, that is what America is about. And politically every leader in this country and every American has got to stand up against any form of violence. That is unacceptable.
I talked to a lot of Black Lives activists in various states. What I learned is that the relationship of police departments around the country with the black community is far, far more severe and awful than I had originally known.
I don't want to get people nervous falling off their chairs, but Social Security is a socialist program. It's a program by which the United States government has said that when you get old you should have a steady source of income.
It reminds me in some ways of the debate taking place in this country and around the world in the late 1930s. There were people, in this Congress, in the British Parliament saying, 'Don't worry! Hitler's not real! It'll disappear'.
The Blunt Amendment would have allowed any employer who provided health insurance, or any insurance company, the right to deny coverage for contraception or any other kind of procedure if the employer had a 'moral' objection to it.
I have introduced a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and make it clear that the Congress and state legislatures do have the ability and the power to regulate and get corporate funding out of political campaigns.
Citigroup, Bank of America, and JP Morgan Chase should not be permitted to charge consumers 25- to 30-percent interest on their credit cards, especially while these banks received over $4 trillion in loans from the Federal Reserve.
What are the moral implications? What do these people do when they have tremendous amounts of money? They use that money to perpetuate their own wealth and their own power. Every day, Congress works on behalf of big-money interests.
You asked Marco Rubio if it was too little too late. I think there's a little bit of too much too late, which is, he is just getting down in the muck with Donald Trump. And when you get down in the muck, you get up with muck on you.
In 1940, then-Senator Harry Truman headed up a Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program. In the course of World War II, more than $15 billion in unnecessary and fraudulent defense spending was identified.
Politically, as a result of Citizens United, billionaires are now able to spend as much money as they want on campaigns, which means that you have a political system which is heavily dominated by corporations and wealthy individuals.
We are the only major country on earth that doesn't guarantee health care to all people as a right and yet we end up spending much more than they do, so I do believe that we have to move toward a Medicare for all, single-payer system.
What we have got to do immediately is to say that racism and xenophobia is totally unacceptable and we will stand with the 1 percent of our population who are Muslims, for undocumented people in this country. Absolutely, we will stand.
Wall Street is perhaps the most powerful economic and political force in this country. You have companies like Goldman Sachs, who just recently paid a settlement fine with the federal government for $5 billion for defrauding investors.
It's immoral and wrong that the top 1 percent of the USA owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. We should look at countries like Denmark and Sweden and Norway and look at what they've accomplished for their working people.
Ben Carson and I don`t have much in common politically. But the fact is when you have kids getting involved in the political process, doing their best to elect the candidates of their choice, that`s what the American democracy is about.