[applause] 1199. [applause] across these years come we have worked handinhand on projects , in the trenches,. Rying to make america betterp reagree to disagree but always in a civil way. E of our best [indiscernible] delaware. I have gone there several times to meet joe starting back in the 70s. I want to express my thanks in a to thelar way president ial nominee. Rules, you reached out to america and cover the waterfront. , the best running mate and take this mission to new heights. When president obama chose his they hadate, joe biden a labor union meeting. [indiscernible] americas right to vote is under attack. By the written laws in the south of our country. They cannot afford good health care. You have the stuff that it takes to make america better, so joe biden, please stand and come forward. [cheers applause] mr. Biden thank you, reverend. Well, i am here to introduce, another biden who is going to become president of the United States, my granddaughter, finnegan biden. From chicago. [cheers applause] if anybody can make it, she well. By the way, i lost a daughter, i have one daughter that survived, and i have four granddaughters, and let me tell you, they are incredible. How many men and women have a granddaughter out there . How many have a daughter as well . Here is the deal daughters always are wonderful. Matter of fact, we always have an expression a son is a son , you get to wife, a daughter is a daughter you have the rest of your life. Here is the deal when your daughter is 12 and a half years old, you put this little butterfly in bed, you kiss her good night, next morning when you wake up and walk in, there is a snake in her bed. Daddy, daddy, and they all come back between 19 and 21, and my granddaughter, congresswoman says, youre not hydrating enough. I have to take care of your dad. She is a social worker with a masters degree. But here is the deal. Granddaughters not only always love you, but they always like you. [applause] [laughter] mr. Biden and by the way, she is in college, walking down to campus, she said can we hold hands, pop . You daughters imagine saying that to your dad . [laughter] i love you, kid. By the way, her mom is from the south side. Her other set of grandparents live in chicago, and she is a chicago girl. Anyway, thank you for a much for indulging me, reverend. And i always thank you for remembering my son, beau. He was a friend of yours. And you took care of him, too. Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Members of the clergy, mayor, thank you for the passport into town. I appreciate it. Congresswoman kelly, a great friend and a great congresswoman. And thank you to everyone here. There is a saying in south philly, yall are the ones who dance, thethe Africanamerican Community and labor, and i am not joking. Jesse knows me very well. Raised in that i got the black church, he knows i am not kidding. Before we organized, we would sit there in the church and try to change things, when i was a kid in college and in high school. Look, before i start my what to Say Something about the debate we had last night, and i heard and i listened to, and i respect senator harris. Are we all know that 30 seconds to 60 seconds on the Campaign Debate exchange cant do justice to a lifetime commitment to civil rights. I want to be absolutely clear about my record and position on racial justice, including bussing. I never, never opposed voluntary busing, and as a program that senator harris participated in and that made a difference in her life. I did support federal option to address root causes of segregation of hours was a communities, including taking on the banks and redlining and trying to change the ways in which neighborhoods were segregated. I have always been in favor of using federal authority over state segregation. I cast a vote in 1974 against the amendment called of the gurney amendment, which would ban to the federal courts from using busing as a remedy. It was not what you would call the most popular vote in the country at the time. So, reverend jackson, we spent a working together over the years, and a lot of issues matter. I fought my heart out to make sure that civil rights, equal rights are enforced everywhere. These rights are not to the states to decide, they are for the federal government to decide. It is a constitutional question to protect the civil rights for every single american and that has always been my position. That is why i ran for federal office in the first place. As reverend jackson may be one of the few people that knows, my city was the only city after dr. King was assassinated that was almost burned to the ground, 20 of it. The on the city in the United States of america since reconstruction those occupied by the National Guard with drawn bayonets on almost every corner for 10 months. I came home from law school that year, and i had two political heroes dr. King and bobby kennedy, and they were both assassinated the year i graduated. I came home and had a job at a prestigious firm, and after five months, i decided i could not do it. I ended up leaving and becoming a public defender. One ofwas elected, th the first things i did was go and try to sponsor the Voting Rights act. I wrote the law, the provision in the law that allows the attorney general to pursue cases involving a pattern or practice of conduct by Law Enforcement officers in violation of federal rights. I wrote that law, and i used that power during the obamabiden administration. Our department of justice investigated police abuse including in ferguson. By the way, we worked like the devil to make sure that you should not allow Police Departments to buy excess military vehicles like humvees and armored personnel carriers. You going to a neighborhood and police are going with an armored personnel carrier. Our criminal justice reforms as president and Vice President reduced the prison population by 38,000 people. Ladies and gentlemen, the obamabiden administration, we commuted more sentences than the than the previous 13 president s combined. [applause] way, with all due respect, i say to chicago and to everyone, my president gets much too little credit for all he did. He was one of the great president s of the United States of america, and i am tired of hearing about what he didnt do [applause] mr. Biden this man had a backbone like a ramrod. He had a backbone like a ramrod. You want to know what a person is made of . Watch them under political income of low pressure. About elected as you are to fall off a cliff. We had to pass an act, the recovery act, that was 800 billion. And guess what . Remember, he loved during the state of the union to turn his surprise me and he said sheriff , joe is going to enforce the act. [laughter] thanks a lot, mr. President. 800 billion. We get it with less than 2 of waste, fraud or abuse in that act. But here is what you get, everything that landed on his desk, i watched him. I watched him, i sat with him every single morning, and i watched him. For hundreds of hours in the socalled, the situation was not what wolf blitzer lived, the real situation room. I watched him, and i want to tell you, chicago, you had a great, great man out here, and he is still is a great man, and he still has a lot to offer. [applause] when we were in office, we passed a support of Discipline Initiative to break the schooltoprison pipeline. Folks, the discussion in this race today should not be about the past. We should be talking about how we can do better, how we can move forward, how we can give every child in america the opportunity to see success stories. These are not somebody elses children. These are all our children. They are all our children. Not a joke. They are all our children. They are the kite strings that lift our National Ambitions aloft. We have to make people realize what you all are doing. What you are doing is every single child in america has enormous potential. Every single child has enormous potential. But it means you have to have good schools in every neighborhood. No childs future should be determined by their zip code. That is why i propose increasing tripping finding for title i schools to eliminate disparities between rich and poor school districts. We will increase teachers pay, make prek absolutely a requirement across the board. Ladies and gentlemen, these teachers walking to school every day, like my wife, she taught in the Public School system and now, she teaches at community college. She has never stopped teaching, by the way, the only secondly i thus second first lady who has had a fulltime job, teaching 15 credits a semester. [laughter] mr. Biden by the way, i am known as jill bidens husband, and i am proud of that. But i earned it. I had to ask her five times to marry me before she would do it. I dont know how that happened, thank you lord. But anyway. [laughter] mr. Biden look, those of you who are teachers in here, you are expected to teach the children to read, write, add, and subtract. But guess what, kids come to school with their burdens and problems. We have too few School Psychologists too few social , workers, too few people in there doing what needs to be done to give kids a chance. And we are going to do that under my proposal. [applause] mr. Biden look, we are going to finish the work of disseminating our schools, because we have a National Interest in creating Diverse School bodies. That is what i believe. We have to make sure that we are moving closer to the idea of americas founding. We all learned in school, we hold these truths selfevident that all men and women are created equal, we the people. We have never lived up to that. We have never lived up to that, and this is the 400th anniversary of the first African American being brought to the shores of the United States in slaves. That is the regional sin of this nation. Miller never walked away from it either. We have never walked away from the expectation. All of you in this room have never worked away from it. And theres only one president i know who has deliberately walked away from it, and that is donald trump. Not a joke. Think about this. I do know about you. Jess, but i never saw it. After all the progress has been made, i see people marching out of fields, carrying torches, contorted faces, anger and hate, accompanied by White Supremacists and the ku klux klan, met by decent, honorable people who said we dont hate here. And what happens . A clash ensues, a young woman died. And what did he say . When asked about it, he said, quote, no president has ever said this there are very fine , people in both groups. He has yet to apologize or criticize the ku klux klan and White Supremacists. Look, we have a president who promotes hate, who has encouraged the poison of white supremacy. Our children are watching. Was president , our kids not only could, but they did look up to him. What the president say matters. It matters. And by the way, when we stay silent, our silence is complicit. That is what i learned from my dad. Your silence is complicit. You know, i promise you, if i get elected president , i will be a president who stands against racism, who forces inclusion and societynce ever in our inclusion and tolerance everywhere in our society, and our institutions, voting booths, and in our hearts. It matters, what we say. It is important to stand by and start by recognizing black, hispanic, asianamerican workers, nativeamerican workers, communities of color all across the nation that have driven the Labor Movement all across this country, as you mentioned, mr. President , a moment ago. From the atlanta washerwomen strike in 1880 to the strike and boycott in the 1960s, to chicagos own abby white and jacqueline vaughn, black and brown power have always been an integral part of organizing, to demand equal pay, basic treatment, equal power, as my dad would say, some dignity, taking on the fight of all workers, from farmworkers workers to domestic workers, to tearing down systemic racism along the way. We owe them. We owe them big. And we owe you. If i am elected president , i want you to know labor will have an absolute, full partner in the white house, and i think labor knows that from me. [applause] mr. Biden folks, a lot has changed very badly, and this president and some members of the Corporate Community believe that i want to make it clear to them wall street did not build america. Stockbrokers and Hedge Fund Managers did not build this country. You build this country. The Great American middle class, the unions built the middle class, that is why it exists. [cheers and applause] mr. Biden and we need to rebuild it. But this time, we have to take everybody along, no matter their race or gender, ethnicity, religion, who they love, where they live, or whether they had a disability. My dad had an expression, joe, jewelry, a job is a lot more than just a paycheck, and he meant it. He said, joe, it is about your dignity, is about respect in the community, it is about looking your child in the eye and say, honey, it is to be ok, and mean it. Too few people, as has been referenced today, too few people think they can say that anymore. The firstajority, for time in about 80 years, the vast majority of middleclass people are shrinking. They no longer believe their children will have the responsibility. Mr. President , you talked about how your dad persisted and changed things. And in todays corporate culture, in this administration, they dont care about your dignity. Instead of investing back into our workers, with record profits, record profits instead of investing back to research and development and creating more opportunities corporate profits are going to , pay dividends to shareholders and blockbuster executive compensation. Ladies and gentlemen, they are squeezing the life out of workers today. Yes mr. Biden and by the way, making it harder to meet the very basic needs. Stripping your personal dignity along the way. There has long been a war on labor unions. As pointed out today, mr. Chairman, yall are coming back. But here is the deal, there has been another war going on that has not been noticed very much, on the ability of individuals be able to bargain for their selfworth. 40 of workers today have to sign a noncompete agreement. Now, it is one thing to have access to secrets of a great, Technical Organization to sign, i wont compete. But a significant portion of these people are hourly workers. Up until i started hollering about this, if you worked for jimmy johns, you had to sign a noncompete agreement saying you would not while cross town and try to get . 10 more from mcdonalds. What is this all about . It is only one purpose, to hold down the ability of individuals even to bargain for their own self worth. It is to keep wages low, and it is wrong. Too Many Companies today classify their workers as managers, when labor fought to make sure that if you are an hourly worker, you had to be paid overtime. What did they do . The person stacking spaghetti cans on top of a shelf in a supermarket, but you control the person who runs the forklift, to bring it out, they say you are now a manager. Ladies and gentlemen, it cost more than 400 million workers 1. 2 billion last year. Where did it go . It went back into the pocket of america, back into the socalled job creators. Since when . Since when were they job creators . The autoworkers of my state that make all those automobiles that are gone now, since when were they not job creators . Today the only people, mr. Chairman, who think they are job creators are stockholders. It is ridiculous. And look, speaking of overtime, it is long past time we have a 15 federal minimum wage. Long past time. [cheers and applause] folks no, it really is and we are getting it done around the country. Folks, we need to build an economy that rewards work, not just wages, not just wealth. Wages have to be rewarded. Wages. Do you realize that people who are multimillionaires and pay only Capital Gains get a lower tax rate than any of you all do . Look, if i elected president , i am will immediately repeal the tax cuts for the super wealthy. You know, we have 1. 6 trillion in loop holes that exist in the law now . 1. 6 trillion. You cannot justify the vast majority of that. And so, folks, look, what i am going to do is use the money to invest in americas future. There is an incredibly long list of policies that i dont have time, nor do you have an inclination to listen to me go through. But we need an inclusive economy, for better access to capital for blackowned businesses, to reducing the decline in black homeownership , to making sure homes in black amenities are valued fairly. Do you realize, the same home i know you do a same home in a predominantly black neighborhood, the same exact home, and one in an overwhelmingly white neighborhood, in the black neighborhood cat is valued at significantly less, limiting your ability to borrow against it, limiting your ability to do much about it, and guess what . You pay a higher insurance rates for it, too. We need to make sure black mothers feel confident when they send their son out on the street that they are going to be safe. Weve got to recognize that kid wearing a hoodie may very well be the next poet laureate and not a gang banger. Ladies and gentlemen, there are too many black men, and i might add women, in prison. Thisarted to have problem addressed in our administration. I just met with bobby scott from virginia. The safe justice act. It needs to be passed. We need to do more. No more minimum mandatory prison sentences, period. The end of private prisons, as barack and i talked about. [applause] mr. Biden funding. A recent law that i wrote, drug courts. At least 400 million a year. Bail reform. No one should be in jail because they dont have the money to pay their bail. No juveniles and adults present. Mandatory treatment, not jail, for those affected by and struggling with addiction. It makes no sense to put people in jail. Put them in treatment and keep them there while they are going through treatment. Decriminalize marijuana. Automatically expunge marijuana convictions. Look, folks [applause] mr. Biden and finally, end the crack powder cocaine disparity so it is 11, no difference. Too many