Neera Tanden Quotes

If you look at Middle America and the reason why it's so red is because the Democratic Party cannot relate to them. They definitely have not done anything to support people from where I come from in West Virginia.

We need a Democratic Party open, that is bringing working people into the party, that is bringing young people, that bringing all of the people of this country who are sick and tired of an economy that works well for the 1 percent while the middle class struggles.

Trump is dividing people against each other; he's going to try and sow racial division; so you have to figure out an answer. I think really the only answer for the Democratic Party, or for progressives at large, is to have an answer about how these people who haven't been to college, who haven't had a lot of things given to them in life, are going to do better, year after year after year.

The situation is that in Germany capitalism has remained, classes and class struggle have remained which all the same will break into the open, which includes also the field of struggle of parties representing opposing classes just as it broke through in, let us say, Spain.

We're going to stand with working people. We're going to take on the billionaire class. We're going the take on the drug companies and the insurance companies. We're going the take on Wall Street. That's where I think the future of the Democratic Party lies.

Government can't deliver a free lunch to the country as a whole. It can, however, determine who pays for lunch. And last week the Senate handed the bill to the wrong party... the poor and middle class.

There is far too little discussion in Washington about the collapse of the middle class , almost no discussion at all about the incredible income inequality and wealth inequality in this country, and the fact that we're moving toward an oligarch form of society.

America has become one of the foremost countries in regard to the depth of the abyss which lies between the handful of arrogant multimillionaires who wallow in filth and luxury, and the millions of working people who constantly live on the verge of pauperism.

There never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other.

It's ginned up by the corporate plutocracy as a way of distracting the working-class people that it's screwing. We hamstring our own natural progressivism in this country, and that's really stupid.

I assume the president's going to say he got bad intelligence... I think that wherever you see poverty, whether it's in the white rural community or the black urban community, you see that the resources have been sucked up into the war and tax cuts for the rich.

So long as millions of human beings in every country has to sell their labour-power to a small minority of owners, and to sink into the most wretched misery if they could find no buyers, the so called “equality before the law” remains a pious fraud, since the laws are made by those who find themselves in possession of the social wealth. But in the same way there can also be no talk of a “right over one's own person,” for that right ends when one is compelled to submit to the economic dictation of another if he does not want to starve.

The fact of the matter is that the U.S. is run by an unusually class-conscious, dedicated business class that has a very violent labor history, much worse than in Europe.

I think the working men and women are getting hammered right now. They want someone they can trust to stand with them. And part of the reason so many conservatives are uniting behind our campaign is, I'm the only one who led the battle against amnesty, has led the battle to secure the borders, has led the battle for the working men and women of this country.

The very mudsills of society. We call them slaves. But I will not characterize that class at the North with that term; but you have it. It is there, it is everywhere, it is eternal.

Exploitation is not exclusively capitalist, but wealth creation is.

It is brought home to you...that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior.

So long as the great majority of the poor in any country are inert and are laboring without any hope in this world, the whole associated life of that community rests on an equivocal foundation. Its moral and social order is tied to an economic system which starves and mutilates the great majority of the population, and under such conditions its religion necessarily becomes a spiritual drug, administered for the purpose of subduing the popular discontent and relieving the popular misery.

The decision is I'm going to do everything I can to fight for the working class of this country, the low-income people against income and wealth inequality, do everything we can about climate change.

They talk about class warfare -- the fact of the matter is there has been class warfare for the last thirty years. It's a handful of billionaires taking on the entire middle-class and working-class of this country. And the result is you now have in America the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on Earth and the worst inequality in America since 1928. How could anybody defend the top 400 richest people in this country owning more wealth than the bottom half of America, 150 million people?

We don't use the term 'working class' here because it's a taboo term. You're supposed to say 'middle class,' because it helps diminish the understanding that there's a class war going on.

This country's going to have a revolution if something doesn't happen the haves and have - nots.

I always feel like a bit of an outsider myself, but as a working class lad, the system was always against me. The British system itself and then of course all the illnesses that were challenging to me.

This country isn't working for working people. It's working only for people at the top. That's not the American dream. That's the American nightmare.

Despite all of the civil rights gains of the past several decades, when it comes to economic opportunity, African Americans and Latinos still experience far more unemployment than do whites and Asians, average wages are lower, and household wealth is lower. A smaller percentage of African Americans and Latinos attend, and complete, college, than is the case with whites and Asians, and a higher percentage end up in prison. All of these are indicators of massive disparities in opportunity, and these disparities are mirrored in poverty data.