After noting some things from today’s joint Biden/Sanders livestream, I wanted to pull from the transcript the Joe Biden bits to which I was referring.
And at the turn of the 20th Century, our labor movement built the middle class out of factory workers, and now two decades later, the 21st Century, our labor moment is trying to build that by including not just factory workers, but service workers too. Healthcare and home care workers, you’ve been fighting for them for a long time. Childcare workers, janitors, garbage truck drivers, grocery store clerks, fast food workers. In short, people on the front lines of this crisis.
Here’s what I’m hoping, Bernie. I’m hoping that the American people are going to get a fresh look at really who makes the country run. I really mean it. We’re seeing the country restore … it’s the soul of America, we’re seeing a little bit of it. These people coming forward doing extraordinary things when they don’t have to.
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And look, one of the things that I think as a student of history, as you are, American history, out of every crisis Americans faced from the Civil War straight through to today, we have come out of it stronger. We’ve come out of it and fixed things that were institutionally, structurally wrong beforehand. We haven’t fixed them all. But look what happened with the Great Depression. We got everything from social security to right… a whole range of things.
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As I’ve said for a long time, when we do that, we’ll not only do the hard work of rebuilding this nation, we can transform this nation. We can transform it so that it goes down in history with your help, Bernie, as one of the most progressive administrations since Roosevelt.