Thom Hartmann: And greetings my friends, patriots, lovers of democracy, truth and justice, believers in peace, freedom and the American way, Thom Hartmann here with you. A lot in the news today, a lot for us to talk about today, as we go into anything goes Friday. But it being Friday, it is brunch with Bernie for our first hour. Senator Bernie Sanders with us. I like to think of him as America’s senator. Of course when I lived in Vermont I thought of him as my congressman, now he’s a senator. And I know the good people of Vermont are very, very pleased and very proud to have him as their senator. His website is Sanders.Senate.Gov and he will be taking your calls, here, for the next hour, in this national town hall meeting. Brunch with Bernie. 866-987-THOM. Senator Sanders.
Bernie Sanders: Good to be with you, Thom.
Thom Hartmann: Great to have you here with us. A lot of things in the news in general, the FEMA relief battle seems to have resolved…
Bernie Sanders: There’s a lot of things going on, let me just kind of…
Thom Hartmann: Yeah, just go, okay.
Bernie Sanders: I know that in Vermont, New Jersey, North Carolina, other states, people are worried about disaster relief. And what we’re dealing with is for the first time in the modern history of this country we have our right wing extremist friends who are saying that when disaster strikes, we’re not going to provide emergency relief. We want to “offset it." We want to have a major debate about whether we cut education or Medicare or whatever before we can come up with money to help rebuild communities. And I think that is an outrage for a dozen different reasons. Not to mention the kind of precedent that it establishes. Can you imagine a major, major disaster in this country and instead of getting the relief that those communities need we have this ongoing debate.
I should also mention of course that when it came to bailing our Wall Street or expanding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or giving tax breaks to the rich, these very same people had no problem, there were no offsets at that point.
Thom Hartmann: Right.
Bernie Sanders: So we are working hard. We’ve got 2.6 billion more for FEMA which should take us through mid December. But there’s no question that we’re going to have to put more money into the department of transportation and so forth and so on. So that’s one issue that many of us are working hard on.
Our second issue, I know a lot of concern to people who listen to the show, the status of social security. I think this has been a fight that I have been waging along with many others in congress, you know, as chairman of the committee to defend, the caucus to defend social security in the senate. And we’ve been up and down on this issue. I think right now we’re in a reasonably good place. The president who in the past has talked about making cuts in social security ha backed off those cuts and I think because millions of people have said, Mr. President, you were not elected to make cuts in social security, you were elected to strengthen social security. And I think the Obama administration has been hearing that message. So they’ve backed off, that’s a good thing.
We still have our right wing republicans who would like to, in some ways, destroy social security completely but I think they are now in a strong minority. So I think we are making some progress but we have to be vigilant on that. As I mentioned in the past, I’ve introduced legislation with nine cosponsors that would lift the cap on taxable, payroll tax taxes above 250 thousand. And if you did that, you would have social security be solvent for the next 75 years. That would take care of the problem completely. And we’re getting a lot of support around the country on that. Because I think people understand it does not make a lot of sense that a multimillionaire pays the same amount into the social security trust fund as someone making 106 thousand dollars. So we’re making progress on that, we’ve got to stay vigilant, but I think at this moment, at least, we may have pushed back successfully on cuts in social security.
On the other hand, I worry about what’s happening to Medicare. I just read in the front page of the Boston Globe today that the American Hospital Association is trying to put pressure on congress to raise the retirement eligibility age from 65 to 67. And that would be an unmitigated disaster for senior citizens in this country. Thom, just try to imagine being 66 years of age, of modest income, coming down with cancer, being diagnosed with cancer, and not having any health insurance at all.
Thom Hartmann: Yeah.
Bernie Sanders: It is unspeakable, unacceptable and we’ve got to remain focused on that issue and make sure that those cuts do not take place in Medicare.
Thom Hartmann: Why would the hospital association want to raise that? That doesn’t make sense.
Bernie Sanders: Because they feel that they are subsidizing Medicare right now. So if you are 65, every person who comes into Medicare right now, they feel they are expending more than they are getting. So if they can keep people out of Medicare for a few years, they see that as a savings. But all of this, all of this speaks to the fact that we have a dysfunctional healthcare system, the most wasteful and bureaucratic in the entire world. One that ends up spending almost twice as much per person on healthcare as do the people of any other country. And that speaks to the need really of a Medicare for all single payer system which is the most cost effective way to provide healthcare to all people, something we are working on in Vermont and are continuing to work on in Washington. But that’s what they are pushing for, and other people have been pushing for that as well. Essentially, well as I’ve said, it would be a disaster for many seniors.
Now there’s something that’s very interesting that’s going on, on another subject. And that is the demonstrations taking place in New York City on Wall Street. And I’m not quite clear what the demands there are…
Thom Hartmann: They have none so far.
Bernie Sanders: Pardon me?
Thom Hartmann: They have none, there are no specific demands. They simply want to call out, we’ve been doing a daily report from there and have had people on the ground there reporting. And, in fact they’ve created a little community that’s very democratically run and they have decided not to have any demands, at least at this point, other than to point out that they’re speaking for the bottom 99%.
Bernie Sanders: Well I think it’s important. Because focusing attention on Wall Street is very, very important. Because at the end of the day, in my view, we are not going to get out of this recession, this horrendous recession. Where 25 million people have no jobs, where wages are going down, unless we do focus on Wall Street. But also I think it’s important that we begin to raise some demands. I mean all of us know that as a result of the enormous amounts of money Wall Street put into congress in their successful efforts to deregulate Wall Street we ended up with the collapse, financial collapse, which led to this terrible recession. And I think that unless we really bring about very, very strong Wall Street reform, I think we’re not going to have the kind of economy that we desperately need. Some of the issues I think we should be focusing on is the reality that right now, hard to believe, the top 6 financial institutions in this country have assets of over 60%, 6-0 percent, of the GDP in America. Isn’t that incredible?
Thom Hartmann: That is mind boggling, yes.
Bernie Sanders: Six institutions.
Thom Hartmann: Six banks basically.
Bernie Sanders: Six banks. You know, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley. These six major financial institutions control 60% of the assets of the United States. And that’s bad for two reasons. Number one, I have no doubt in my mind that the day will come again when they will be in a position where they are about to collapse and they’re going to go to congress and say we’re too big to fail, you’re going to have to bail us out again. And number two, just from a competitive perspective, who thinks it’s a good idea that six institutions have that much economic and political power over the nation in terms of issuing credit cards, issuing mortgages. And we’ve got to, in my view, break them up. We’ve got to break them up, and bring some serious competition to the financial industry.
Second of all we’ve got to demand that there be a cap on credit card interest rates, which go up to 25, 30% today which is, in my view, usury. Thirdly we’ve got to take a hard look at the Fed. One of the provisions that I managed to get into the Dodd Frank Financial Reform Bill calls for an ordinate of the fed and we learned that the Fed provided 16 trillion dollars in low interest loans through financial institutions to corporations in America and around the world. And that’s just unbelievable. We’ve got to use the Fed to help deal with unemployment rather than just bail out Wall Street.
Thom Hartmann: Well said. Brunch with Bernie. Senator Bernie Sanders, right back with you.
Transcribed by Suzanne Roberts, Portland Psychology Clinic.
