Senator Elizabeth Warren,

The signatories of this petition urge you to stand with your Progressive colleague, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, during this tumultuous election year.

Senator Sanders founded the Congressional Progressive Caucus, yet many members of that same caucus have endorsed Secretary Clinton, who, until recently, has shirked the label of progressivism and has plead guilty to being a moderate. We need you now, more than ever, to endorse the true progressive in this presidential election.

Both the Secretary and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, are from an organization called the Democratic Leadership Council. This organization promised to give us a “Third Way” that would bring forth great prosperity, but it only ended up giving us a new generation of Democrats with a diluted sense of liberalism. We do not want a third way. We want the right way. A way where Democrats don’t roll over to special interest groups; where Democrats aren’t complicit in the deregulation of the financial sector.

We must not allow Secretary Clinton’s attempts to parrot Senator Sanders’ progressive rhetoric obfuscate our memories of the past nor her record. While she occupied the post of First Lady, President Clinton oversaw the deregulation of the finance industry that created the housing and dot-com bubbles, leading in part to the Great Recession only a decade later.

The Secretary says that she was tough on Wall Street - that she told them to “cut it out -” while she was a Senator representing the state of New York. That is simply false. Secretary Clinton has used her positions of power to advocate and protect the financial sector from all but its most egregious excesses. She has even used the 9/11 attacks to justify her means of collaborating with Wall Street. As Senator Sanders said at the first Democratic primary debate this past autumn, the bankers on Wall Street are not stupid — they make campaign contributions because they work. Secretary Clinton embodies the current model of a corporately financed campaign, unsurprisingly as her largest financiers come from Wall Street institutions, telecommunication conglomerates, and lobbyists.

Since the 2008 financial crisis, the already bloated financial sector’s assets have grown larger than ever. The watered down protections, provided by the Dodd-Frank legislation, have been further undermined and rolled back.  In order to act preemptively and avoid another economic crash, it is vital that the “too-big-to-fail” financial institutions, in which we see are growing larger every day, are broken up.

Gambling that Secretary Clinton has turned over a new leaf, and will actually stand by the progressive platforms, while she is standing on out on the campaign trail, is not a bet we are willing to take; not at a time when the financial sector is more powerful than ever before and a crash of a single institution can prompt a massive global recession.

A solid indicator of how one would govern upon entering office, is by looking at the way a politician campaigns. Secretary Clinton seeks out wealthy donors at private events and receives enormous sums of money through several Super-PACs. Senator Sanders is running a campaign funded by millions of small donations, without a Super-PAC .

Secretary Clinton is funded by the wealthy.

Senator Sanders is funded by the people.

Senator Warren, your own supporters are overwhelmingly in support of your colleague Senator Sanders. His commitment to fighting government corruption, and enacting campaign finance reform, reflects the core values you have espoused and fought for as a U.S. Senator. We urge you to fight back against the Democratic Establishment and to help elect someone who will return the Democratic Party to the progressive values on which it thrived. Democrats are ready to leave the party if the moderate establishment candidate is chosen over the candidate that many of us can wholeheartedly support for the first time in our lives. This nomination will either be the demise or revival of the Democratic Party.

We, the people, will not vote for the lesser of two evils.

We want Bernie Sanders, and will fight to have him elected.