According to the experts, Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) has zero chance of winning the 2016 Democratic nomination.
Nevertheless, on Thursday he announced he’s running for president, vowing to make his candidacy about issues that are extremely and personally important to the progressive Left.
“This country today, in my view, has more serious crises than at any other time since the Great Depression of the 1930s,” he said. “For most Americans, their reality is that they’re working longer hours for lower wages. And [in] inflation-adjusted income, they’re earning less money than they used to years ago, despite a huge increase in technology and productivity.”
“While at exactly the same time,” he quickly added, “99 percent of all new income generated in this country is going to the top one percent. How does it happen that the top one percent owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent? And my conclusion is that that type of economics is not only immoral, it’s not only wrong, it’s unsustainable.”
He also took a shot at the Koch brothers, and blasted the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United vs. FEC.
“As a result of the disastrous Supreme Court decision on Citizens United, we now have a political situation where billionaires are literally able to buy elections and candidates,” he said. “Let’s not kid ourselves. That is the reality right now.”
“So you have the Koch brothers,” he added, “and other billionaire families, now prepared to spend hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in elections to buy the candidate of their choice.”
Naturally, he also addressed the issue of climate change, hammering skeptics for ignoring the inviolable wisdom of the “scientific community.”
“We have a Republican Party with virtually few exemptions that does not even recognize the reality of climate change, let alone that it is caused by human activity, let alone that the scientific community tells us this is the major global environmental crisis that we face,” he said. “And I want to see this nation lead the world in transforming our energy system away from fossil fuel to energy efficiency and sustainable energy.”
Perhaps his biggest concern, however, is unemployment.
“Real unemployment is not 5.5 percent,” he intoned. “Real unemployment is 11 percent. We need to create millions of jobs, and the best way to do that it is to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure—and I’ve introduced legislation to do just that.”