In an address on Monday at The Brookings Institution, Sen. Bernie Sanders laid out an Agenda for America calling for more jobs and a $1 trillion investment in repairing our crumbling infrastructure. 

He also talked about how a 2010 Supreme Court ruling has eroded the democratic process by letting billionaires like the industrialists Charles and David Koch spend unlimited sums to buy elections. 

“On Saturday, I was returning from Pennsylvania to D.C. and my friend and I drove through Gettysburg – where we stopped for a while to visit the beautiful museum there and to check out the very important role that Vermont soldiers played in the Battle of Gettysburg.  And of course, while there, we read Lincoln’s extraordinary Gettysburg address – where he spoke of his hope that this nation would have a “new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

“And as we drove home it struck me hard that Lincoln’s beautiful vision – a government of the people, by the people, for the people – was, in fact, perishing, was coming to an end, and that we are moving rapidly away from our democratic heritage into an oligarchic form of society – where we are experiencing a government of the billionaire class, by the billionaire class and for the billionaire class.”   

Watch the speech

Read the speech