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. And special greetings to this week’s new affiliates, we’re going to, we’ve been kind of doing them day by day as they go through. I’m going to just start doing them on Fridays. - UCentral TV, out of the University of Central Oklahoma, carrying our show. Puget Sound Access, covering Auburn, Burien, Kent, Renton, SeaTac, Tukwilla, and King County, Washington. BTV Access, also known as Bridgewater Television in Bridgewater Massachusetts. And KMAS FM, 104.1, in Olympia Washington. So greetings to all of you who may be encountering our show for the very first time. This being Friday, Friday we always start the hour, the show, our first hour is Brunch with Bernie. Our one hour national town hall meeting with the guy that I think of as America’s senator, although Vermonters know that he is their senator, Senator Bernie Sanders. Senator Sanders, Welcome.

Bernie Sanders: Good to be with you Thom.

Thom Hartmann: Great to have you here. So what’s on your schedule for this week?

Bernie Sanders: Well there’s a lot that’s going on and let me just briefly go over them. Unemployment figures came out today and they were mixed. The official unemployment rate went down to 7.5%, that’s the good news. The bad news is that the real unemployment rate rose to 13.9%. And the point here is that the government uses a number of indices to determine what unemployment is. The official unemployment rate does not include those people who have given up looking for work and those people who are working part time when they want to work full time. So the truer indicator of real unemployment is what we call the U6 index, and that’s at 13.9% and something that should be a real concern to all of us. I am especially concerned and hope to get into this a little bit more with youth unemployment, Thom. At a time when we have millions of people who are looking for work and can’t find jobs probably the hardest hit groups are young people, and those are people just graduating high school, or people graduating college often with large debts. So creating the millions of jobs that this country desperately needs should be at the very top of our agenda. We’ve got to stay focused on that issue.

Some good news is that in the state of Maine, Maine became this week the 13th state in the country to go on record in favor of a constitutional amendment to reverse the disastrous Citizen’s United decision. This is an issue that for anyone concerned about American democracy and trying to combat the huge impact that big money has on the political process, the fact that Citizen’s United and the Supreme Court said that if you’re a billionaire or large corporation you can spend as much money as you want on an election. If you want to turn that back we need a constitutional amendment. I have offered that amendment, some others have as well, and Maine just came on board that issue.

Also I think many listeners know what sequestration is about, a very, very poor way, a bad way, to do deficit reduction. One of the areas that I am concerned about is that programs like Meals on Wheels, congregate meal programs for seniors, have seen significant cuts. We have a lot of pain in the senior community, a lot of folks who have a hard time buying the food that they need, paying for their prescription drugs, heating their homes, taking care of the basic necessities of life. We should not be cutting back on Meals on Wheels and this is an issue that I intend to address in the coming weeks.

There’s another issue I wanted to touch on, it was highlighted I think by a piece in the New York Times today, indicating there are a number of investigations going on against J.P. Morgan Chase, the largest financial institution in the country. But what we should appreciate is that virtually every single major financial institution in this country has engaged in fraud of one point or another. And I think it is fair to say that at a time when the financial institutions are so huge, and you’ve got six financial institutions, if you can believe this, having assets equivalent to 2/3 of the Gross Domestic Product of the United States of America. I mean that’s just extraordinary. What that means in terms of power, what it means in terms of wealth. And every single one of these financial institutions has grown larger since we bailed them out because they were too big to fail. But if you look at all of them, whether it’s J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, all of these have at one point or another in recent years paid very substantial fines for breaking the law. So the question that has to be raised, we had a town meeting here a few weeks ago, with Matt Taibbi who I know is on your show occasionally…

Thom Hartmann: Yeah.

Bernie Sanders: And Matt writes about Wall Street. And the real question that we have to ask is whether fraud is the business model of Wall Street? Whether it’s not, you know every company is going to make a mistake, every person makes a mistake, but is fraud, deliberate cheating, the business model of Wall Street? I think you could probably make a case that it is. But bottom line here is that I, and others, a few of us, are working on a very, very important issue, and that is the need to break up these huge financial institutions which have so much economic power over our nation and so much political power as well. So that’s an issue that I think we should focus on.

Another issue, also you and I have I talked about, is the issue of media concentration. You know, if you try to understand as a nation where we are and how we know what goes on, what should be frightening to all Americans is there really is not a diversity of viewpoints out there in media. You have increasingly a small number of large media conglomerates who own and control what the American people see, hear, and read and that concentration of control has grown very substantially in recent years. You have companies like Comcast, Disney, Time Warner, Newscorp, Firecom, CBS, Rupert Murdoch’s company, Newscorp, controlling a very, very significant amount of the information in this country.

President Obama has named a gentleman named Tom Wheeler to be his new chairman of the FCC. And I wrote to Mr. Wheeler expressing my concerns about media consolidation and wanting to know his views on that terribly important issue. And there is legislation that we have on the books called cross ownership prohibiting one company from owning more than a certain amount of television stations, radio stations, and newspapers, in a given community. And there has been an effort for many years to try to soften that so that one company can really control almost the entire flow of information in the given media market. And that’s something we want to stay on and see how Mr. Wheeler feels about it before I cast my vote on that issue.

So those are some of the issues that are out there.

Thom Hartmann: Yeah, that’s quite a collection. And on the media consolidation, it looks like the Koch brothers are actually trying to get in on that game, possibly looking at the Tribune companies.

Bernie Sanders: That’s right, it’s a slightly different issue, but an issue of huge consequence, as I’m sure you have discussed on the show. The Koch family, which is two guys that are worth 25 billion a piece, a total of 50 billion, one of the wealthiest families in America. And I think as many listeners know they have been extremely involved in right wing politics, extremely right wing politics. They have contributed hundreds of millions of dollars as a result of Citizen’s United into the recent 2012 campaign, I expect that those huge contributions will continue. They have set up many, many, set up and contributed and funded, many, many so-called think tanks, right wing think tanks, who have the goal of cutting taxes for the rich, destroying social security and Medicare and Medicaid and so forth. And now they want to own the Tribune companies newspapers, I think. That would be a very dangerous development.

Thom Hartmann: 15 minutes past the hour, it’s our Brunch with Bernie hour, Senator Bernie Sanders, taking your calls right after this.

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Thom Hartmann: Welcome back to talk media for the sane among us, the Thom Hartmann radio and TV program. And it’s our Brunch with Bernie Hour, Senator Bernie sanders on the line with us, taking your calls in our national town hall meeting. Neil in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, you are on the air with Senator Sanders.

Neil: Hi Senator Sanders, it’s a pleasure to talk to you. My question is why aren’t the democrats going after the republicans, I know everything is about diplomacy, but why are they not going after them on their lack of patriotism and ethics and morals when they don’t seem to care about the infrastructure of this country, they don’t seem to care about jobs. They have filibustered every single jobs bill, every single infrastructure bill. They seem more obsessed with abortion than they are with the health of this country. I mean why aren’t the democrats going after them, like really, seriously going after them?

Bernie Sanders: Well, Neil that’s a great question, and I share your analysis. And I would make that criticism of the president as well. I think what we have to understand, there are different ways that you can do politics, especially in the political moment that we are in right now. And I think what people have to appreciate is that in the House of Representatives, and everybody understands that to get legislation passed you have to go through the senate, the house and then signed by the president. Right now, in the House of Representatives you have a majority, the republican majority. Which is working night and day to protect the wealthiest people in this country. And in answer to the previous question is, you know, dealing with lying and sequestration, what these guys believe, this is what they believe. We have a serious deficit problem, which we do. The deficit was caused by the wars that Bush got us into, tax breaks for the rich, and the deregulation of Wall Street and the financial crisis of less revenue coming in. Those are the causes of deficit reduction. What all of these guys want to do is balance the budget on the backs of the elderly, cutting Social Security, doing away with Medicare as we know it, massive cuts in Medicaid, cuts in education, cuts in environmental protection, nutrition programs, that’s what they believe. And this whole fight over sequestration was do the wealthiest people in this country who are doing phenomenally well, and at a time when we have growing wealth and income inequality, do you ask them to stop paying their fair share of taxes. Do you do away with the loopholes that corporations now enjoy so that one out of four major corporations is not paying a nickel in taxes. These guys are stashing their money in the Cayman Islands and Bermuda and other tax havens and the republicans are saying that’s fine, that’s fine, not a problem. But we must cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and education.

So to get back to Neil’s question, the issue is given that reality there are two approaches to dealing with that. Number one you can say okay hey, republicans control the house, we’re going to have to deal with that reality, even though those views are way, way, way outside of what the American people support. So you can do what President Obama did and say okay, I am going to give you what you guys have wanted for years, I am going to make cuts in Social Security for the so called chain CPI. I am going to do corporate tax reform deficit neutral, not bringing in any more revenue. I am going to raise premiums on people on Medicare who make more than $47,000. And I hope you republicans, with me having given you all that, I hope you republicans will now work with me.

Now that’s one approach. I think that that’s a failed approach. And not only the president but a number of democrats take that approach. What’s the alternative? The alternative is to speak truths to the American people and say look, middle class is disappearing, poverty is just extremely high. We have 14% of our people are unemployed. The rich are getting richer, large corporations are enjoying record breaking profits, and you know what? We are not going to do deficit reduction on the backs of the most vulnerable. And I need the American people to stand with me, working families, to stand with me, to say that we’re going to create millions of jobs for our young people and for all workers. We’re going to deal with global warming, because it’s a serious, serious problem. And we are going to take on the republicans. And the way you defeat republicans is by raising consciousness and by giving the republicans an offer that they can’t refuse. And that is that after they continue along that approach of wanting to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, education, protecting the interests of the wealthy and powerful, you know what, that represents about 20% of the American people. And let them have their 20%. Our side will have 80%, we can defeat them. But those are the choices that the president and the democratic leadership have to make. Make a real, clear statement to the American people and demand their participation.

So I agree with Neil. I think we have not done that, I’m an independent, caucus with the democrats, but when the president talks about cutting Social Security and benefits to disabled vets, he muddies the message, he muddies the message and makes it harder for the average person to say well is there really much of a difference between the republicans and democrats?

Thom Hartmann: Lawrence, in Berkeley, California, listening on the WCPT stream.

Lawrence: Yeah, hi Thom, hi Bernie. I wanted to ask you Bernie, in my reading of the constitution, congress can overturn Citizen’s United without a constitutional amendment because Article 3, Section 2 says “supreme Court shall have jurisdiction with such exceptions and under such regulations as the congress shall make." So therefore congress only has to say by majority vote you may not rule on what constitutes a human being.

Bernie Sanders: Lawrence, I have to respectfully disagree with you, I think it’s more complicated than that. Congress, of course, can start the process for constitutional amendment and then bring it to the states. But I think most lawyers would not agree with your interpretation. By a 5 to 4 vote the Supreme Court decided on that Citizen’s United decision, that a corporation is a person, and has the political right to spend as much money as they want during a political campaign. It’s a decision that very few Americans agree with. I think we’ve got to overturn it. But I would say, Lawrence, your way, politically, would not work. We don’t’ have the support to do it in the congress and I think that that’s probably not a proper approach.

Thom Hartmann: 26 minutes past the hour, or 27 minutes past the hour, it’s the Thom Hartmann program. Our Brunch with Bernie Hour, senator Bernie Sanders answering your questions, taking your calls, in our national town hall meeting, here at Brunch with Bernie. And be sure to check out Bernie’s website, sanders.senate.gov, you can subscribe to the Bernie Buzz, you can sign his petitions, and it’s a great news site, in general. sanders.senate.gov

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Thom Hartmann: 34 minutes past the hour, welcome back to the Thom Hartmann program, occupying the media three hours a day, five days a week. And this hour is Brunch with Bernie, Senator Bernie Sanders taking your calls in our national town hall meeting. Mike in Clarksville, Tennessee. You are on the air with Senator Sanders.

Mike: Thank you very much and thank you Senator Sanders for your honest service to this great nation.

Bernie Sanders: Thank you Mike.

Mike: I just wanted to briefly touch on the federal budget deficit debate. You know, I think what we all need to do is get back to fundamental economics which is mainly just numbers. You know, the American people may be confused about a lot of other stuff but, you know, we know how numbers add up and don’t. You know, the federal budget deficit that is about a trillion and a half a year, most of that money goes directly into the top 1% income earners, you know, that’s… the reason that we have a budget deficit is because, you know, supply and demand have to equal out otherwise we would have no economy whatsoever. And you know, instead of raising people’s wages, like we should have been all this time, these last 30 years, we’ve just been encouraging people to take out more debt on their own and the government has been spending, you know, government spending which is just debts, and of course, you know, of course that goes into everybody’s pockets who benefit from that, but…

Thom Hartmann: So Mike do you have a question for Bernie?

Bernie Sanders: Well I think I got, let me just a couple of points, Mike. The deficit is in fact a serious issue but it is not the most serious issue. The most serious issue is that real unemployment in this country is almost 14%. That it is a lot higher for younger people, for minorities, and that we have got to put people back to work. And by the way, when you put people back to work, when your economy expands, people then are not getting unemployment, they’re not getting welfare, they’re not getting food stamps. What they are doing is paying taxes. You create jobs, you help lower the deficit as well. And I believe that one of the things that we can do, which will stimulate the economy, to put people back to work, is rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, roads, bridges, rail, water systems. Put a lot of people back to work doing that. And also start transforming our energy system away from fossil fuel to energy efficiency and sustainable energy. The deficit today, by the way, is not one and a half trillion, we have made some significant progress in recent years, I believe it’s lower than 900 billion right now, that’s still a lot of money.

But the issue that we have to deal with, and I’m not sure that everybody understands it, is what our republican friends want to do is say okay we’ve got a deficit. The only way, the only way that we will consider to deal with the deficit is to cut, cut, cut. Cut unemployment benefits, cut nutrition programs, cut education opportunities, cut Medicare, cut Medicaid. And when you do that, not only do you cause a whole lot of suffering for working families and low income people who are struggling to keep their heads above water, you lose jobs. If you’re cutting education that means instead of hiring preschool educators, you are laying them off. If you’re cutting back on public services, first responders, fire departments, police departments, you’re laying off police officers and firemen rather than hiring more of them. So you’re growing unemployment, you’re increasing unemployment rather than lowering it.

So I think the solution to deficit reduction is you need more revenue. Right now revenue is about 16% of GDP, very, very low, compared to modern American history. So I think Mike’s point is that federal investments create jobs and one of the reasons that people are in a lot of trouble is that when wages go down, and when you have the middle class disappearing, when real wages go down, when people are now working longer hours for low wages, how do they make up the difference? They have to borrow money, they go deeper in debt. So, you know, I think Mike makes a good point. But the bottom line is, the most important issue, that government has got to deal with now is creating jobs.

Thom Hartmann: Paul, in San Francisco, California, you’re on the air with Senator Sanders.

Paul: Hello Senator Sanders. I’m calling about the postal service. And I know that you have put forward a bill to help save them and I believe representative DeFazio is working on the house side. Can you tell us what is happening with those two bills and what we, a regular person like me, can do to help move those along and maybe…

Bernie Sanders: Good question. Okay let me back up a little bit and tell the listeners what the issue is and talk a bit about what people can do. A couple of years ago the Postmaster General came up with the idea that we should shut down 15,000 rural post offices in American. Shut them down completely, regardless of what that means to rural communities. Shut down about half of the processing plants in America, slow down mail delivery and Saturday mail service and shrink the size, the number of workers that we have in the postal service by several hundred thousand, all of which takes place in the middle of a recession, where unemployment is much too high. I and a number of other senators and members of the house disagree with that approach and we think, and it’s not what we think. What the fact is, and most people don’t know this, is the major financial problem facing the postal service is not the decline in first class mail, which is a serious issue, obviously people use email now who used to use first class mail. That is an issue.

But the most serious problem is that in 2006 congress mandated for the postal service something that no other government agency comes close to have to doing, and in fact no private company does, and that is to pay out 75 years of retiree health benefits in a 10 year period. And that means that the postal service has to put over five billion dollars every single year into that retiree health program, which as I recall is about 85% of the financial problems facing the postal service. So they have some other problems, that is the main problem. And if you address that problem, you’ve got a long way to solving the financial problems facing the postal service today. And obviously our legislation does that.

Second area is that the postal service in a very aggressive way has got to address the fact that we do live in the 21st century and that email is real and computers are real and make changes accordingly to respond to that. And thirdly they have got to be more aggressive in developing new ways to raise revenue. Right now by law if you walk into a postal service and you say something as simple as can you please notarize this document before I mail it they can’t do it by law, if you can believe that. They can’t give you ten copies of a document that you have. They’re not allowed to reproduce those documents. They can’t sell you a fishing license or a hunting license, by law. So if we ease those regulations, we allow them to become a little bit more entrepreneurial, and raise more revenue, I think we can go a long way to solving their financial problems, maintaining a decent level of employment in the postal service, and keeping services alive in rural areas, like the state of Vermont, where people, where it is very, very important for folks.

Now what can people do? Well we have good support. I can’t remember the exact number of co-sponsors, but we have a lot. I think a lot of senators, some conservative ones understand how important the postal service is to the elderly, to veterans, and to other people. So I would urge Paul, get the word out. I’m sorry I don’t have the number of the bill in front of me. But it’s the Sanders Bill on Postal Reform, and we would appreciate people making calls to their senators and house members in support of that.

Thom Hartmann: And CallCongress.org is a website, one of our websites, that has the phone numbers for the switchboards, and even some toll free numbers that you can use to call congress, call your members of congress.

Bob in Woodbury Heights, New Jersey, you’re on the air with Senator Sanders.

Bob: Hi Senator Sanders, hi Thom, pleasure. I’m a postal worker at a processing plant and an officer in the union. I'm not going to tell you what I do or they'll know who I am but I would like to know how you feel about Senator Carper

and Representative Cummings who sit on the committees for government oversight and when I watch them on CSPAN they seem a little squishy. Do you have confidence in them? Or what’s your feelings on that?

Bernie Sanders: Without commenting on individual members of congress, let me just say this. I got involved, I’m not on the committee in the senate, that goes through the Homeland Security Committee, which has jurisdiction for a number of government programs, including the postal service. So I don’t sit on the committee which is chaired by Senator Carper and Elijah Cummings is the ranking member democrat in the house. What I observed a couple of years ago when Joe Lieberman was the chair of the committee, I was not happy with the direction in which the committee was moving. I thought it was making kinds of cuts in the postal service that I felt uncomfortable with. So what my role was, I organized kind of an ad-hoc committee that I think ended up being 15 or 16 members of the senate, who shared my concerns. The end result of that is we were able to make the bill that got to the floor a lot, lot stronger than what had originally been in the Homeland Security Committee. It was a reasonable bill and it passed the senate with I think 62, 63 votes. Didn’t do everything that my legislation did but it did address this most important issue of ending the onerous burden of five and a half billion dollars every year going into this retiree health plan. So we are now working with Carper and the committee to get the strongest bill that we can. I think we may end up seeing something close to the bill that passed the senate last year.

Thom Hartmann: That didn’t make it through the house though, right?

Bernie Sanders: That’s correct, it did not.

Thom Hartmann: Senator Bernie Sanders with us. 45 minutes past the hour. We’ll be back with more Brunch with Bernie right after this. And visit Bernie’s website at sanders.senate.gov , a great news site plus you can sign up for his newsletter.

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Thom Hartmann: Welcome back to the place where we dare to ask is Wal-Mart a person? And we dare to say no! Not a chance! The Thom Hartmann Program, it’s our Brunch with Bernie Hour. Bernie you were just talking about wealth and corporate power. May I, with your permission, read three sentences from Thomas Jefferson to, that maybe you can riff on?

Bernie Sanders: Sure.

Thom Hartmann: Okay. He was speaking of what happens if super wealthy people get too much power, too much political power. Keep in mind that the wealthiest man who signed the Declaration of Independence, John Hancock, was only worth $700,000 in today’s money. These guys were the upper middle class, the were not the real rich, those people all left. Anyhow, Jefferson said: “

... No other depositories of power have ever yet been found which did not end in converting to their own profit, the earnings of those committing to their charge. If the overgrown wealth of an individual be deemed dangerous to the state the best corrective is the law of equal inheritance to all in equal degree." He’s talking about an estate tax essentially.

Bernie Sanders: Right. Well, look. What Jefferson wrote then is true today in spades. The kind of inequality we have, and just, you know Thom it’s very interesting to me. There was a poll that came out, Gallup did a poll, and I don’t have the exact wording in front of me. But basically they asked the American people, they say: “How do you feel about distribution of wealth in America?" And over 60% said we worry about it, it’s unfair. Then they asked this question, and this is what the question was, “Do you believe the government should redistribute wealth by raising taxes significantly on the rich." And I don’t’ have the exact statement in front of me, so I may be off by a word or two, but that’s essentially what it said. And you know what? 52% of the people said yes. Now do you know how many people in the United States congress would even raise that issue? A handful. So you have the majority of the people picking up on Lee’s point, they understand there is something wrong when so few have so much. When the top 1% owns 38% of the wealth in America and the bottom 60% owns 2.3% and when these guys, the Koch brothers and others, make greed into their religion and they said that’s not enough, we only have 50 billion dollars in our family, what do we care that over 20% of the kids in America live in poverty? What do we care that people listening to this show right this minute, seniors, don’t have enough money to buy the food they need. That’s not our problem. We need more, and more, and more. Cut our taxes, cut programs for working people. And then they come up with a whole philosophical and economic treatise that they pay professors to write, why it is always a great idea to give more to the rich and more to the powerful and take from the working people and the poor. And you know, they have all these organizations that come up with these great theories. But that’s what it amounts to. What Jefferson was writing about, and what Lee is talking about. Now how do we deal with that? You know, the answer is, and every week people ask that same question. And the answer is not complicated. It is old fashioned political organizing. That means people have got to understand that it is terribly important for the future of this nation, for the salvation of the middle class of this country, that they be involved in the political process. What does that mean? It means not just registering to vote, it means holding your elected officials accountable, holding town meetings, organizing petitions. Politicians do the wrong thing when nobody is holding them accountable. And right now, for example, I have been working very hard with a number of other senators on trying to prevent cuts to Social Security. I think we’ve got a shot to win. You know why we have a shot to win? Because we’re waking up the American people. And the American people overwhelmingly do not believe that you maintain huge loopholes for large corporations and then cut Social Security or Medicaid, etc. And when people stand up and say excuse me Mr. Senator or Ms. Congresswoman, you ain’t going to do that, guess what, they won’t do it. But if people are not paying attention, that’s when bad things happen. Because the lobbyists are all over Washington DC, people are getting huge amounts of campaign contributions to do the wrong things. The only antidote to that is people by the millions saying excuse me, we ain’t going to do that.

Thom Hartmann: Okay. David, watching or listening over at sanders.senate.gov in Mamaroneck, New York. You’re on the air with Senator Sanders, we have just two minutes to the end of the show, so real quick question please?

David: Oh hi, good afternoon Mr. Sanders, let me make this really quick. You know, I never dreamed in my life that what I was learning in school and was faintly the muckrakers and the trust breaking at early in the last century would ever repeat itself in the Untied States but I think you would agree with me that that’s what’s been happening since the Ronald Reagan. Do you think that it’s going to take a depression to get us out or are we going to have a Calvin Coolidge who did, as you know, didn’t turn his back on the great Mississippi Flood, before things change?

Bernie Sanders: Well David, I, you know, I don’t’ want to see a mass depression and suffering. And also, I think by the way, looking at Germany in the 1930s, when people become very, very, very desperate and don’t have enough to eat, and their money is worthless, they look at demagogues to solution. So I hope we don’t need, you know, I certainly hope that doesn’t happen. I think, as I just mentioned a moment ago David, we just need grass roots organizing. And I know that that is really hard, it really is hard stuff. It is hard to elect strong progressives, it is hard to make sure that we keep people accountable. It is hard to even learn the information about the information that we need because the media very often will talk about superficial things and not basic things, we don’t hear a whole lot of discussion about income and wealth inequality in the media and how we can deal with that. So David, no I certainly don’t want to see a depression. As I said earlier we’ve got almost 14% unemployment today, that’s quite high enough for me and I want to see that cut. But I think we just do it by working with our neighbors, electing good people, holding them accountable, demanding that they stand up for working families and not the wealthy and the powerful.

Thom Hartmann: Bernie, just 15 seconds, a quick final thought?

Bernie Sanders: Well the final thought is that we are heading into some very, very difficult moments. Congress is going to have to make some real choices and I hope the American people stand firm. Let their members of congress know, no cuts to Social Security, no raising premiums on Medicare, no cuts to Medicaid, that we have to ask the wealthiest people in his county and the largest corporations to help us deal with deficit reduction, and we can’t do that, we can’t balance the budget on the backs of people who are already hurting.

Thom Hartmann: So very, very well said. Senator Bernie Sanders, sanders.senate.gov his website. Bernie, thank you again for being with us.

Bernie Sanders: My pleasure, Thom, take care.

Thom Hartmann: Always an honor.

Transcribed by Suzanne Roberts, Portland Psychology Clinic.