On Monday morning of convention, UE delegates heard from Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who praised UE for its history of standing up for the working class, and for “bringing people together from so many different walks of life, blue-collar workers, graduate students, understanding that we are all in this together.”
Sanders told delegates that those who want to increase their own wealth and power have used the same playbook throughout history. That playbook consists of getting working people to blame “powerless minorities” for their problems, which Sanders called “a means to deflect attention from the people who are really causing the crises, the people who have the power, the people who own the society.”
He said we are “living in a moment where we are the wealthiest country in the history of the world, but most people don’t know it because almost all the wealth is going to the people on top. And this is not an issue we're supposed to talk about.”
Sanders slammed billionaire and corporate ownership of the media and of both political parties, and proclaimed the current administration to be “a government of the billionaire class, by the billionaire class, and for the billionaire class.” He ended his short speech with a warning about the fact that the people on the top are “investing hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars in artificial intelligence and in robotics” in order to pursue “more wealth for them and more power for them.”
Following his remarks, Sanders engaged UE members in a lively discussion about the political crisis facing the working class. When Orisa Coombs, Local 1043, suggested that the reason “so many working class people support Trump” is because of “the fact that Trump does acknowledge working class struggles,” Sanders replied “I think Orisa hit the nail on the head.”
Trump campaigned on the premise that “the system is broken,” Sanders said, “and you know what? Trump is right. The system is broken. If you are not making any more in real inflation-accounted wages than somebody's doing your work 50 years ago — system is broken. If you can't afford health care — system is broken. You can't afford housing — system is broken. You can't afford education — system is broken. He's right. But his solutions are dead wrong.”
Working people are not going to respond to Democrats’ agenda of “tinker[ing] around the edges,” Sanders said, and suggested a different approach: “So what we can say is the system is broken. The way to fix it is not to hate people because they're undocumented or they're trans or whatever they may be. The way you fix the system is take on the greed of the ruling class, create an economy that works for all of us. That's how you fix the system.”