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Bernie Sanders Describes & Defends the Progressive Platform, in a 16-minute Extemporaneous Speech

24 October 2026, posted by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

Although U.S. Senator Sanders is no pure anti-neocon, which I am, he is a pure progressive in almost all other respects, and I agree virtually 100% with what he said today in his campaign pitch to end the Republican Party’s control of Congress:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mp3wGn4KwsM

“Bernie Takes on Elon and Trump”

24 October 2026, Bernie Sanders, 16:31

Thank you very much for joining me. A few days ago, I returned from a campaign swing through Florida and Texas. Great turnouts. Uh, before that, I was in California and Maine. Uh, this weekend, I'll be heading to Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin. And I think you all know the reason why I am on the road. Uh, this is the most important midterm election in the modern history of this country. And together, you and I have got to do everything that we can to end the Republican rubber stamp Congress that now exists. Let me be clear. Donald Trump is the most dangerous president in the history of the United States. This is a guy who does not believe in the Constitution or the rule of law. He is a pathological liar. He is a narcissist and he is running the most corrupt administration in American history. Further, at a time when 60% of our people are living paycheck to paycheck, Trump's policies are making the richest people even richer while causing more and more suffering for working families. Let me just give you a few, just a few concrete examples, of what Trump's policies have meant for working people. Trump in his big beautiful bill threw some 15 million Americans off the health care they have. Why? Why do you do such a thing? Well, he did it in order to give a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the richest 1%. The only way we reverse that disastrous policy, which by the way is going to result in the deaths of thousands and thousands of Americans, is to end Republican control over the Congress. Trump in a way that was illegal and unconstitutional started a war with Iran that has resulted in the deaths of 19 US service members, thousands of innocent civilians in the Middle East, and has raised prices in the US and around the world. You want to end that war? The only way we do it is by ending Republican control over the Congress. Trump, what can I tell you, believes that climate change is a hoax coming from China and his policies have been designed to make the oil companies and the fossil fuel industry more and more profitable while adding more carbon into the atmosphere. And if we are going to deal with this existential threat of climate change, the only way we do that is by ending Republican control over the Congress. Trump's domestic army, ICE, is out of control. ICE has killed innocent Americans. It has terrorized communities throughout our country. If you want to bring ICE under control, if you want to move toward comprehensive immigration reform that provides a path toward citizenship for millions of hardworking people, the only way to do that is to end Republican control over Congress. Trump loves the big tech oligarchs, some of the very wealthiest people in the world, and he thinks it's a wonderful idea for these big tech oligarchs to go forward advancing AI with no regulations at all because he knows that they really are concerned about the needs of the working people. They are honest, trustworthy. That's what Donald Trump thinks. Well, if you disagree with Donald Trump and if you think we should have significant guard rails protecting the American people from AI, the only way we're going to do that is to end Republican control over the Congress. Now, I don't have to tell anyone because you already know it that we are living in crazy and difficult and challenging times. And above and beyond Donald Trump, there are issue after issue out there that we're going to have to come and address. We are right now experiencing unprecedented income and wealth inequality. We have a corrupt campaign finance system. We have a dysfunctional health care system. We have, as I just mentioned, uncontrolled AI. We're looking at climate change. And we're seeing growing bigotry, Islamophobia, anti-semitism in our country among many, many other challenges. Now, between you and me, the response of Democrats to these crisis is much too often inadequate. But the Republican response is beyond pathetic. And I want you just to think about think about how they are responding to the crisis that we are facing. we are facing. What are they doing? Well, the truth is they are completely unable to address even discuss the dangerous realities that we face in any serious way. So what they do do are two things. They're responding in two ways. First, they are spending unbelievable amounts of money to try to buy these elections. Wherever you live, turn on the TV, you're going to see ad after ad, lying ads, awful ads paid for by billionaire funded super PACs. And it's not just Elon Musk who was spending some $400 million to retain Republican control over the House and the Senate. You got it? $400 million from one guy. But it's not just Musks. It's super PACs funded by the crypto people, by the AI companies, by AIPAC, and by other billionaire funded super PACs. So, that's number one. They hope to buy this election. Second of all, what they are doing is going racist big time. We're seeing it every day. We're seeing that with their attacks against Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who just happens to be a Muslim. We're seeing that in Michigan. where the campaign against Dr. Abdul Elsayed is now mostly centered around Islamophobia. Trump and others are referring to Abdul as a terrorist, a jihadist, and throwing out every bloody thing they can against him because he is a Muslim. Now, that is the bad news. Here's the good news, and that is despite being greatly outspent, progressive candidates are running incredibly strong grassroots campaigns and they have an excellent chance to win all across this country. And the reason that they're doing so well is that unlike the Republicans and unlike moderate Democrats, progressives are talking about the real issues impacting working families. In other words, they are telling the truth about what's going on. And what is that truth that they're talking about? Never before in American history have so few people owned so much wealth and had so much power. Now, you don't hear that much on TV. You're not going to hear it in the halls of Congress. That is the reality. Never before have we had the kind of income and wealth inequality that we have today in which the top 1% now owns more wealth than the bottom 93%. Never before have we been in a situation in which the very rich are getting much much richer while 60% of our people live paycheck to paycheck struggling to put food on the table, pay for housing, pay for health care, pay for the basic necessities of life. We have never ever seen this level of inequality before. Not in the gilded age of Rockefeller and JP Morgan and Carnegie. Never before. more unequal, more unfair today. But it's not just economic power and inequality that we're experiencing. Never before in American history have we seen a billionaire class, a ruling class with so much political power. And never before have we seen such an unprecedented level of greed, arrogance, and irresponsibility on the part of these people. They literally believe that they have some kind of god-given right to rule. In America today, we have the absurd situation where Elon Musk, richest man alive, now owns more wealth than the bottom 53% of American households. One guy, more wealth than the bottom 53% of American households. CEOs of large profitable corporations make 350 times more than their average worker. And over the last year, after receiving the largest tax break in history, fewer than a thousand billionaires in America became over 2.2 trillion dollars richer. And what is really distressing and I think why the American people see feel so angry and frustrated is that what we're seeing today, while it's accelerating, why it's worse, is really not a new development. Over the last 50 years, nearly 80 trillion dollars in wealth has been redistributed from the bottom 90% to the top 1%. Despite massive increases in worker productivity and an explosion in technology, the average American worker is making $25 a week less today than he or she did 53 years ago after adjusting for inflation. Now, it seems to me that in this very difficult moment in American history, of course, we have to go after Trump and his disastrous policies and his horrific personal behavior. But that is not good enough. What we need and what Democrats must adopt when they win the House and the Senate is an agenda that finally speaks to the needs of working families and has the guts to take on the big money interests. And here's just a few things that has got to be done. First and foremost, we have to end this corrupt campaign finance system. Billionaires can no longer be allowed to buy elections. We need to have one person, one vote. That's called democracy. Further, we need a wealth tax on billionaires. With the very richest people becoming much richer and in many cases paying an effective tax rate lower than a nurse or a truck driver, we need to raise trillions of dollars over a four-year period from the billionaire class and use that money to build some 7 million units of lowincome and affordable housing. We're going to address the housing crisis. We're going to make child care free and universal and make public colleges and universities tuition free. And in order to strengthen public education in America, we make certain that no public school teacher earns less than $60,000 a year. That's what we can do when we have a wealth tax on billionaires. Further, we need to do what every other major country on earth does and understand that healthcare is not a privilege. It is a human right that we got to cover every man, woman, and child. And we do that through Medicare for all singlepayer program. At a time when millions of workers earning starvation wages, we got to raise that minimum wage to a living wage, in my view, 20 bucks an hour. And we also have got to pass the PRO Act to make it easier for workers to be able to join unions. Further, as we combat the horrors of climate change, we've got to move our energy system away from fossil fuel to energy efficiency and sustainable energy. And when we do that, we create a whole lot of very good paying jobs in a society which is aging. We got a lot of senior citizens who are struggling right now to just address their basic human needs. Uh we have got to expand social security benefits and extend the life of social security. And the way to do that and more and more people understand it scrap the cap. Right now it is insane that somebody making 10 million a year pays the same amount into social security as somebody paying 186,000. You scrap that cap, we can raise benefits and extend the life of social security for the next 75 years. Further in what I am seeing all over the country uh people are really really concerned about the existential and economic threats of AI. They're worried about it economically and whether or not their jobs are going to be uh destroyed. Uh they're worried about the mental health of their kids. They're worried about the impact will have on a democracy. They're worried about in fact what happens when AI becomes smarter than human beings. Will we be able to control AI? Uh and what in my view we have got to do is we have to place a pause on advanced AI and ban super intelligence. We should not have an AI that is smarter than human beings that runs the possibility of escaping human control with all of the potential dangers that that uh can bring about. Further, we need to finally en endless wars. We don't need to spend $1.1 trillion on the military when we have 800,000 people in America who are homeless and people uh cannot afford basic necessities. And we have got to finally stop funding the extremist government of Netanyahu in Israel. The American people are sick and tired of putting billions of dollars into this genocidal government. They want us to invest here in America, not in Israel. Uh my friends, in 1933, long time ago, Supreme Court Justice Lewis Brandeis said, quote, "We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both." End of quote. What Brandeis said 93 years ago was true then, it is even more accurate today. Now in the year 2026, we must choose democracy over oligarchy. We must choose economic justice over greed. Now, I understand as well as anybody the power of the oligarchs, their enormous wealth, the fact that they control our economy, they control the media, trying to control the political system. These guys have enormous power. But what I believe is that if we stand together, we don't let Trump and his friends try to divide us by the color of our skin or where we were born or our sexual orientation. If we stand together, we can take these greedy people on and we can defeat them. So that's what our mission is right now. We got less than two weeks left to go through this enormously important uh election. Please do everything that you can to make sure the Republicans do not continue to have rubber stamps, rubber stamp Congress. Uh and do everything you can to make sure that we elect progressives to the House and the Senate. So, thank you all very much. Less than two weeks left to go. Let's get out and work. Let's win this thing. Thank you all.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.