Visitors to the Boott Cotton Mills Museum at the Lowell National Historical Park become fully acquainted with the struggle by workers a century ago to win the rights and protections that culminated in the thriving and dominant middle class of the post World War Two era. Beginning in 1980, however, the powers who, in the Nineteenth Century and before treated workers as just another commodity that could be used up and discarded in the name of profits, began clawing their way back to power. Fifty years from now historians will characterize the thirty years since then as an outright economic war on the American middle class, a war that is sadly dismantling many of the protections that were created during the Progressive Era.

Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont, may not have visited the Boott Mills, but he certainly appreciates what’s at stake in this economic war on the American middle class. In the following video, 13 minutes in length, Senator Sanders does a masterful job of indicting those trying to roll back these reforms, and reminds us of the consequences should they succeed.

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