The Speech

People are coming out because the very, very rich are getting richer, while the rest of us are getting poorer—they feel the rigged economy every day. They feel it when they open up their bills around the kitchen table, pull items out of their grocery carts, or tell their kids their jackets can last one more winter.

Traveling around the country, I keep hearing the same thing: Americans are fed up with the way things are going. They're sick of cuts to social services, and threats to vital programs like Social Security, while their hard-earned tax dollars are pilfered to pay for unnecessary wars and corporate welfare. They're sick of working longer hours for lower wages just to line the pockets of the rich—who, in turn, are outsourcing their jobs through bad trade deals and undercutting our ability to bargain for fair wages. And they're sick of corporate greed destroying our political system, as Big Money interests spend unlimited sums of money to elect the candidates of their choice.

In the last two years, 15 people saw a $170 billion increase in their wealth, while 45 million Americans live in poverty. That in my view is not justice. That is a rigged economy, designed by the wealthiest people in this country to benefit the wealthiest people in this country at the expense of everybody else.

And hundreds of thousands of Americans are standing up and demanding change.

What I believe from the bottom of my heart is that I cannot do it alone.

No president can take on Wall Street, corporate America, the corporate media, the Koch brothers, all the Big Money interests, unless there's a mobilized force of millions and millions of people who stand together and demand government work for all of us, not just the wealthiest people in this country.

We've done this by putting people at the center of our campaign—without a Super PAC funded by billionaires, bankers, or Big Business. Our movement doesn't represent their interests and we don't want their money. Instead, we have relied on small contributions from working people.

When we started this campaign, I knew we had a message that would resonate with the American people.

It isn't the first time. There was a similar reaction when I gave a long speech on the Senate floor five years ago.

On Friday, December 10, 2010, I woke up at my usual time, had my usual breakfast of oatmeal and coffee at the Dirksen Senate Building, and then had a typical daily discussion with some of my staff. At 10:30 a.m., I walked onto the floor of the Senate and began a speech. It went on for eight and a half hours—until 7 p.m.

I had promised to do everything I could to oppose what I believed was a very bad tax agreement pushed by Republicans. At a time when this country had a $14.8 trillion dollar national debt and the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country, it seemed to me totally absurd to provide hundreds of billions in tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires.

I decided to object in the loudest way I knew, by mounting what some referred to as a filibuster but what was, in reality, a long speech on a very important subject. I did not want merely to speak about the agreement, nor even about the politics of compromise and concession. I tried my best to state what I thought to be the essential fact of our times: that the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few families, at a time when tens of millions of Americans struggle to get by and tens of millions more Americans are watching the underpinnings of their middle-class lives take repeated hits, is turning our country into a plutocracy.

What does it say about our economy and the political choices we make about it on Capitol Hill that, today, despite all the huge increases in productivity and technology that we've seen in recent decades, a two-income family now has less disposable income than a one-income family did thirty years ago? Why is it that Americans work the longest hours of any people in the industrialized world?

What is the correlation between the United States having, by far, the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major country while we also have more people in jail? Doesn't it make more sense to invest in our kids than in jail construction?

How does it reflect upon our political and legal system when the crooks on Wall Street who caused the horrendous recession now earn more money than they did before their banks were bailed out by the taxpayers? How come none of them are in jail? And what does it mean when three out of the top four "too big to fail" banks in this country are now larger than they were before the Wall Street collapse, with assets of over half the GDP of the country?

What does it mean to the economic future of our country that we're losing factories and millions of good-paying jobs, and that it is harder and harder to buy products manufactured in America? How does it happen that CEOs of large corporations boast about the advantages of outsourcing their production and jobs to China, but when hard times hit, they come running to U.S. taxpayers for a bailout?

And on, and on, and on!

What does it feel like to stand and talk for eight hours when you can't leave the floor, eat, or go to the bathroom—and know that a TV camera is on you all that time? It's hard. The aftereffect hit me a few days later when I found myself very, very tired. During the speech itself, my legs began to cramp up a bit. My voice also became very hoarse.

When I walked onto the floor, I had no idea how long I would stay there. When I was mayor of Burlington, Vermont, in the 1980s, I sometimes gave speeches for as long as an hour. That was it. Would I last three hours, five hours, twenty hours? I really didn't know. What I was clear about in my own mind, however, was that I wasn't going to read from the phone book or sing songs just to eat up time. I wanted to speak for as long as I had something relevant to say. While I didn't have a prepared script for the speech, I mostly worked off of previous speeches I had given or articles that I had written and occasionally excerpts from some books I had read. I would read a few lines or pages and go off from there. Twice, colleagues came to the floor and engaged in what we call a colloquy. I remain grateful to senators Sherrod Brown and Mary Landrieu for their support of my effort.

Let me also warn the good readers of this book that it contains some repetition. This is not an accident. In giving this speech I was more than aware that most people were not going to be listening to it in its entirety. I suspected that most people would tune in for half an hour or an hour and then move on with their lives. I made it a point to keep returning to my basic themes.

Was I surprised about the kind of attention that the speech received? Are you kidding? The phones in both my Washington and Vermont offices never stopped ringing. In Vermont, every one of my eight staff people did nothing else all day but respond to calls—thousands of calls. And e-mails! The Senate servers crashed because of the huge number of people who wanted to watch the speech live online, apparently C-SPAN 2 had an exceptional day. According to the New York Times, my speech was the most tweeted event in the world on that day. There were front-page stories in newspapers around the country and the speech was covered widely in the international media. The number of people who friended me on Facebook doubled the previous total in one day, and visits to my website went sky-high. Some journalists even claimed that Obama held an unscheduled, impromptu press conference with former president Bill Clinton, who defended the tax deal, in order to divert media attention away from what I was doing on the Senate floor.

Despite my best efforts and the hard work of many other members of Congress, we lost the vote and a very bad agreement was signed into law.

Was my eight-and-a-half-hour speech worth the effort? Absolutely! If this country is going to move forward in a new direction, if we're going to save the middle class and change our national priorities, we have got to cut through the obfuscating fog created by the corporate mainstream media and start focusing on the life-and-death issues that working families really care about.

The very strong response to my speech in 2010 and our campaign tells me that the hunger for a discussion about economic truths, for a counterattack on the ferocious assaults that are taking place against working families, and for a practical plan on how we can reverse the obscene politics that favor the rich over the middle class and disadvantaged in our nation is growing all over America.

When I announced I was going to run for president, I said that it would take a political revolution for the junior senator from Vermont to win the presidency. A lot of pundits thought that was an acknowledgment of impossibility. It wasn't. It was a statement of what would be necessary to undo the damage that has been done and to reclaim our country from the oligarchs. The pundits and the political consultants still have a hard time understanding this. But the people get it. They are turning out by the thousands, by the tens of thousands, for our rallies. They are sending contributions of $5 or $10 because they understand that if we all give what we can, then we might yet be able to beat the billionaire class.

I decided to run for president because I believed it was necessary to do so, because I believed that this campaign could bring about a political revolution, and I believed we could win. We did it in Burlington. We did it in Vermont. And we are doing it in America. Change comes, even in the face of overwhelming odds. And the recognition of the changes we have already made, of what we have won, inspires us to fight even harder.

If we don't stand together today, working Americans will continue fighting an uphill battle just to make ends meet at the end of each month. We cannot settle for establishment politics and stale ideas. Now is the time to transform America.

That's what I believe from the bottom of my heart.