I am concerned about how to reverse the process by which a fundamentalist right and a corporate elite were able to seize power in the United States.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
What we have to do is to definitively remove the last vestiges of power from those who treat terms such as 'liberal democracy,' 'free markets' and 'Europe' with suspicion.
If a radical devolution of powers was possible, it would have been done before. The assumption of states' rights is gone. There's no support for it in the Supreme Court and there's no support for it in public opinion.
I have introduced a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and make it clear that the Congress and state legislatures do have the ability and the power to regulate and get corporate funding out of political campaigns.
The revival of the Right is as extraordinary as it would be if the public had demanded dozens of new nuclear plants in the days after the Three Mile Island disaster; if we had reacted to Watergate by making Richard Nixon a national hero.
I don't want to transform America. I want to restore to America the economic values of freedom and opportunity and limited government that has made us the powerhouse of the world.
Let us wage a moral and political war against the billionaires and corporate leaders, on Wall Street and elsewhere, whose policies and greed are destroying the middle class of America.
Do not allow yourself to imagine that revolutionary thinking can be propagated by governmental power.
This OCCUPIED amendment, this constitutional amendment, would overturn Citizens United. It would make clear that corporations aren't people, that they - the framers of the Constitution never intended to give constitutional rights to corporations, the ones that we enjoy and cherish.
All I want to do is get back to a principle-based Congress.
You can't destroy America by destroying our elite. Think about America's elite. Think about it down through history. Destroy our elite, and about half the time, you're doing us a favor.