Dear John,
I want to talk to you today about why I am running for President of the United States.
When I was growing up, the United States had a thriving middle class. The average American family could afford a house, a car, a yearly vacation, and college for their children. One parent working one job could support a family of four.
But all of that is gone now. America’s middle class has collapsed.
In today’s economy, we have one in four Americans living with medical debt, twenty-eight million Americans getting no vacation days at all, 112 million American adults – almost half – struggling to pay for healthcare, and almost two-thirds of American adults living paycheck to paycheck.
What happened to create this seismic shift in the economic circumstances of the average American? What happened was a $50 trillion transfer of wealth over the last 50 years, out of the hands of the bottom 90% of Americans into the hands of the top 1%.
Corporate America has become more powerful than the U.S. government, now holding Washington hostage in what is essentially a system of legalized bribery. The undue financial influence of corporate forces on government policy has turned us from a "government of the people, by the people, and for the people," to a "government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations.” In policy after policy, short term profit maximization for huge corporate interests is placed before the health, safety and welfare of the average American, our children, our animals, and our planet.
This is wrong, it is immoral, it is unsustainable. And that’s why I’m running for President.
Make no mistake about it, this threat to our middle class is a threat to our democracy. For as the late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said, "we can have large amounts of money concentrated in the hands of a very few - or we can have democracy." We cannot, he said, have both.
