BRATTLEBORO — It is great to be back in Brattleboro. Thank you all very much for what you do as one of the most progressive communities, not only in our state, but in the United States of America. Thank you.
Things like Strolling of the Heifers and Windham Grows, do not happen by accident. They happen because Orly Munzing, the organization's founder and executive director, is a very, very aggressive person - you all know that. She may be short, but she is tough and aggressive!
I want to say a few words, obviously about Windham Grows, but I would also like to say a few words about one or two of the things that are happening in our country today.
And despite the wishes of the people of Brattleboro and Windham County, and despite the wishes of the people of the state of Vermont, we have a president that most of us did not support.
And there is bad news, and there is some good news.
The bad news is that this president is moving us into exactly the wrong direction in every major issue facing our country.
At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, he is proposing incredibly large - hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks for the top 1 percent and the top 2 percent.
So instead of addressing the crisis of income and wealth inequality, while the very, very rich are getting much richer - 43 million people are living in poverty, and the middle class is shrinking - he is going to exacerbate that problem by giving incredible tax breaks to billionaires like himself.
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In terms of health care - all of you know this because we have had meetings right here in Brattleboro time after time, and I know you know this - embarrassingly, the United States today remains the only major country on Earth not to guarantee health care to all people.
And I know you share with me the vision that the day will come when we're going to end that embarrassment and pass Medicare for all citizens.
Despite the gains of the Affordable Care Act, in which 20 million more Americans got health insurance, the United States today has 28 million people with zero health insurance, and even more who are underinsured with high deductibles and high copayments.
And then on top of that, because of the incredible greed of the pharmaceutical industry, we are paying by far the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs.
So the goal of a sensible administration and a country moving in the right direction is to say: OK. The Affordable Care Act did some good things. It has a lot of problems. Let's improve it - how do we provide health care to all people? How do we do it in a cost effective way? Because right now, we're spending two to three times, per person, what health-care systems are doing in countries around the world that provide health care to all of their people.
But as some of you know, and I know most of you know, Republican leadership came up with a disastrous proposal. And I want you all to know what this proposal would do. [Editor's note: This speech predated the March 24 decision by President Donald Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan to pull the American Health Care Act from consideration by the U.S. House of Representatives.]
Now they're in the process, because millions of people are telling them that what they are proposing is horrific. It's unacceptable. They're about to make some changes.
My guess is that there are changes that the leadership in the Republican body will make that will not go anywhere near far enough, but the original plan for “health care reform” - remember, we have 28 million uninsured - is to throw 24 million more Americans off of health insurance.
And then, they want to significantly raise premiums for lower income seniors - the people who are hit the hardest who need health care the most.
According to the AARP, a senior who is 64 years of age today, who's paying $1,700 for her health insurance, will have to pay $13,000 for health insurance, and that person's making $26,000 a year. Half of her income for health insurance. And the truth is people can't do that, and they will drop their health insurance. You'll be 60, 64 years of age and not have any health insurance.
And then these people, because of their right-wing ideology, want to defund Planned Parenthood. And throw 2{1/2} million, many of whom are all low-income women, off of the health care plan they have chosen.
So these guys in Washington know all about choice. They love choice. They want to give everybody a choice.
So 2{1/2} million women in this country have chosen Planned Parenthood for their health care, and the Republicans are going to defund Planned Parenthood next year because Planned Parenthood has the decency and intelligence to say that it should be a woman who controls her body and not the government.
And then obviously, because when you are a bully and you have big money behind you, the easiest people to go after are the poor. So they are proposing in this anti-health-care plan to make massive cuts to Medicaid, which will mean low-income kids and their parents will lose health insurance or see a limitation on the services that they get.
And not only that: Almost two-thirds of Medicaid money goes toward nursing-home care. So you're going to see middle-class people whose parents are now in nursing care paid for by Medicaid having to make decisions about whether they're going to send their kids to college or whether they take care appropriately of their parents.
But here is the good news in that plan.
For all of you who are millionaires, you will get, on average, a $49,000 tax break. For the top 2 percent, over a 10-year period, there will be $275 billion in tax breaks.
So what we're doing is throwing children off for health care, raising premiums for the elderly significantly, defunding Planned Parenthood, throwing 24 million people off of health insurance, so that we can give $275 billion in tax breaks to people making $200,000 a year or more.
This is an outrage. It is a moral disgrace, and together we have got to beat this proposal.
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And then there is President Trump's views about climate change and the environment.
I know that all of you know what the president does not know: that the debate is over regarding climate change.
The overwhelming majority of scientists believe climate change is real, climate change is caused by human activity and emissions of carbon dioxide.
And climate change today, in our country and throughout the world, is already causing massive problems that will only get worse - significantly worse - in terms of rising sea levels, drought, floods, extreme-weather disturbances, mass migrations of people who have to find clean water, and land on which they can grow their crops.
Donald Trump appointed as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency a man who does not even believe that climate change is caused by human activity. And they are going to be dismantling the EPA and some of the major environmental initiatives.
That's the bad news.
The good news in that regard is that state after state are moving aggressively toward weatherization and energy efficiency, toward moving to wind, solar, geothermal, and other sustainable energies.
And the good news is that even corporate America knows what Trump doesn't: that two-thirds of the investments now in energy are not going to coal, oil, or gas. They're going to wind, solar, and other sustainable energy.
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As much as I disagree with Trump's attack on the needs of the working people of this country - and the elderly, and the children, and the sick, and the poor - there is another part of his agenda that is even uglier.
And that is how they are making his administration, with people like Steve Bannon and others, a very, very intentional decision to try to divide us up, to try to obfuscate the real problems of this country, and try to get one group of people to hate another group of people.
Whether it was Trump's attacks on Obama in the so-called birther movement, trying to delegitimize the first African-American president we have had, whether it is his constant attacks on the Muslim community, whether it is his attacks on undocumented people in this country, he is trying to bring one group against another group.
And that is what demagogues always do: they scapegoat.
They try to get the people to move away and not see the real issues facing this country: the collapse of the middle class, income and wealth inequality, climate change.
The fact that we're the only major nation without health care, the fact that kids can't afford to go to college or are leaving school deeply in debt - those are issues we're not supposed to focus on.
What we are supposed to be focusing on is hating some people because they come from a different country or they have a different religion than we do.
And I would say our job - and there's nothing more important than this - is to stand together to defend the undocumented, to defend the Muslim community, to defend women and their rights to control their own body.
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I will tell you that, having gone all over this country, what I learned is that, on issue after issue, the American people support a progressive agenda.
I'm not going to tell you every community is as progressive as Brattleboro. But the American people are in support on issues - on every single one of these issues - like raising the minimum wage to a living wage, on issues like pay equity for women, on issues like creating millions of jobs rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, on issues like transforming our energy system and investing in wind and solar, on issues like making public colleges and universities tuition-free, on issues like demanding that large corporations and the wealthy start paying their fair share of taxes.
Those are not left-wing issues.
And it is simply the weakness of the Democratic Party, the weakness of grassroots efforts, that we have allowed people like Trump and Ryan to become leaders in this country.
So having traveled all over this country, I want to tell you from the bottom of my heart that the views that you hold - they are not fringe views. They are all the majority views of the American people.
The views of Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell - the guys who want to give tax breaks to billionaires and cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid - those are all the fringe views that the overwhelming majority of the American people despise and disagree with.
So our job in this difficult moment is to remember our history, remember the struggles of the civil rights movement, remember the struggles of the women's movement. A hundred years ago today, women did not have the right to vote, get the jobs they wanted, or the education they wanted.
Remember the struggles of the gay community to stand up and fight for justice.
Remember the struggles of the workers movement who fought that workers have dignity on the job.
So this is not a time for despair. It's not a time for people moaning and groaning about how burned out they are because they were in a demonstration three weeks ago.
Now is a time for us to be as smart and creative as we can be.
The vast majority of the people are on our side. The billionaire class and the corporate media are not.
But we can win this thing if we are gutsy, if we are smart, if we are prepared to engage in political struggle in a way that we have never done before all.
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And when we talk about small ideas in areas that we have to pay attention to - that is exactly what Windham Grows is all about. Very simply, we understand that we want good quality food to be going into our kitchens. That's what we want our kids to be eating.
We understand that from a climate-change perspective that if we can grow food locally and employ people locally, it makes no sense to be shipping food from halfway across or this country or from the other side of it.
Our job is to add value to the food that comes out of the earth, to make it healthy, to create jobs in agriculture in our local economy, and that is exactly what Windham Grows is doing.
So I want to congratulate all of the people here in the Brattleboro area who have worked on this program, and I appreciate all the support that has come from the Federal Economic Development Administration, and from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and from the federal groups, all of whom of come together to support this project.
Thank you all very much.