Vermont Maverick Endorses “Occupy Wall Street” Protests
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
U.S. Senator
Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) spoke to the nation Thursday, October 6 on a
conference phone call organized by the progressive organization Democrats for
America (DFA). Though the event was advertised as a discussion on how to keep
Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (Medi-Cal in California) from suffering
budget cuts in Washington, D.C.’s current mania for deficit reduction, Sanders’
presentation was more wide-ranging than that. He said the cause of the federal
budget deficit was “two wars, tax cuts for the rich, the Wall Street bailout
and an unfunded Medicare Part D [prescription drug] program,” blasted
inequitable trade agreements and the so-called “fast track” procedure used to
push them through Congress, and virtually endorsed the “Occupy Wall Street”
protests, now in their fourth week in New York and inspiring similar events in
other cities.
“This is a
pivotal moment in American history,” Sanders said. “The power of big money is
extraordinary. The rich and corporations have extreme influence over the
Republican Party and significant influence over the Democratic Party. Occupy
Wall Street is doing a great job focusing on the most powerful and secretive
institution in the country. I’m glad these people are asking why the people on
Wall Street, whose power and greed caused
this recession, are doing better than ever before.”
Sanders repeated
his comment during the 2008 Senate debate on the Wall Street bailout
legislation that if banks and other financial institutions are “too big to
fail,” then they are too big to be allowed to exist and antitrust laws should
be used to break them up. Instead, he said, the opposite has happened. “The six
largest financial institutions in America have assets equivalent to 60 percent
of the U.S. gross domestic product,” he explained, “and after we bailed out
Wall Street, three of the four largest U.S. banks are bigger than they were before. I have introduced legislation
to break up these banks.”
The main focus
of Sanders’ call was to protect Social Security and Medicare from the
budget-cutters who want to raise the eligibility age and slash these programs’
already meager benefits. He specifically attacked the scare-mongers on the
Right and in the media that constantly refer to the “crisis” facing Social
Security, when the program has enough money to be able to pay all the promised
benefits for at least the next 30 years and it would be relatively easy to
tweak it to keep it going beyond that.
“Social Security
has been enormously successful and accomplished what its founders expected it
to,” Sanders said. “Before Social Security 60 percent of U.S. senior citizens
lived in poverty; today, 10 percent do. In good times and bad, Social Security
has paid out all its promised benefits
for 76 years. Our Right-wing friends have hated Social Security from the get-go
because it’s an example of a government program that works extremely well. Many
of them are honest about it and admit they want people to be forced to go to
Wall Street for their retirement security.”
The remedy
Sanders is proposing is a partial repeal of the so-called “cap” on the payroll
taxes which fund Social Security. Right now, payroll taxes are charged only on
the first $106,000 of a person’s income — which makes the tax highly
regressive, since people who make less than $106,000 pay a higher percentage of
their income in Social Security taxes than people who make more. Sanders’ bill,
which has nine Senate co-sponsors, would keep payroll taxes where they are for
people making up to $250,000 per year, after which they would pay additional Social
Security taxes. According to Sanders, the extra income will keep Social
Security financially stable for the next 75 years.
“This was not an
original idea with me,” Sanders said. “When Barack Obama ran for president,
this is what he campaigned on. We’ve introduced what he campaigned on.”
Sanders also
called the proposal to raise the eligibility age for Medicare from 65 to 67
“reprehensible,” saying it would deny coverage for cancer and other
catastrophic diseases to people who got them at age 65 or 66. “We’re going to
fight to retain Medicare benefits and against raising the retirement age,”
Sanders promised. “We have got to protect Medicare and Medicaid as well as
Social Security.”
Sanders also
commented on President Obama’s jobs bill, saying “I think the President has
some good ideas … [but] I would go further. The best way to create jobs is to
rebuild our crumbling infrastructure. We are falling behind China, which is
spending nine percent of their gross domestic product on infrastructure. Europe
spends five percent, and we spend 2.4 percent.” He also called for the
increased development of renewable energy, which will benefit the U.S. in three
ways: it will create jobs, it will remove us from dependency on Saudi Arabia
and other foreign sources of oil, and it will help control global warming and
other human-made climate change.
“It’s wrong to
say the way to deal with the deficit is to balance the budget on the backs of
the elderly, the sick and the poor,” Sanders said. “We need to send that
message to the super-committee” — the 12 members of both houses of Congress who
are meeting to come up with ways to reduce the budget deficit. “The fair way to
end the deficit is to end the tax breaks to wealthy individuals and
corporations,” he explained — “and to take a look at the military budget, which
has gone up three times what it was in 1997.”
“The vast
majority of Americans are on your side on Social Security and Medicare, but
that hasn’t translated to electoral results,” said Sanders’ first questioner,
Todd Crickmore of central Indiana. “My question is how do you plan to counter
the obstruction you will face as you take your bill to the Senate and the
House?”
“What democratic
politics is about is making sure you win the majority of people to support the
policies that protect their interests,” Sanders replied. “Every House member
and Senator has got to understand that the majority of people don’t want to cut
Social Security, but to protect it. The most effective way of winning these
political struggles is when millions of people engage and write, call and
e-mail their members of Congress.”
“I’m a
registered Democrat but I’ve given up getting Democrats to answer this
question,” said Susan Geddis of Clear Lake, California. “I feel the secret
super-committee is un-American if it puts forward a bill to cut Social
Security. If they do that, will you filibuster it?”
“I will do
everything I can to defeat such a bill,” Sanders said. “When you have rich
people making millions while others are suffering, it’s unconscionable to
balance the budget on the backs of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.”
Sanders was also
asked about the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which vastly increased the capability for
corporations to influence elections by spending money. After joking that “our
Republican friends [on the Supreme Court] have decided 5-4 that Exxon/Mobil and
Goldman Sachs are folks like you and me,” he said that Citizens
United only made it easier for Right-wing
leaders like Karl Rove to pull rich people together to finance campaigns for
Right-wing candidates and issues. He said that if the court doesn’t reverse Citizens
United, he would support a Constitutional
amendment to repeal it.
One of the most
poignant questions Sanders fielded came from Tora, a student at North Carolina
Community College who’s about to graduate and is worried there won’t be a job
available to her once she finishes school. “We have a lot of young people graduating from college with
$25,000, $30,000 or $40,000 in debt with no chance for good-paying jobs,”
Sanders replied. “At a time when we need more teachers, states are cutting
their own deficits by massively laying off teachers, child-care workers, police
and firefighters.” He predicted that the Republicans will be able to block approval
of Obama’s jobs bill “unless we mobilize a lot of people” to support it and
oppose the likely Republican alternative that will “just give more money to
rich people.”
Asked whether
President Obama is truly committed to protecting Social Security or will yield
to Republican demands to cut it, Sanders said, “There is a lot of disappointment with Obama. In December 2010 I
took the U.S. Senate floor for nine hours to say the budget agreement with the
Republicans was a disaster. The Republicans got almost everything they wanted.
I wanted to double funding for community health centers, and instead we cut
$600 million from them. More recently, the Republicans, by threatening to
default on the U.S.’s debt obligations for the first time in our history, once
again got almost everything they wanted.”
Sanders told the
DFA members and others listening to him that the way to fight back against
Obama’s history of caving to the Republican Right “is to tell him you helped to
elect him, you did the work and gave the money, and not to take you for
granted. You have a very important role to tell Obama to keep his promises and not keep giving the Republicans virtually everything
they want.”
Asked by Robert
Willner of Chatham, New York about Republican efforts to disenfranchise what
they consider the “wrong” voters — by requiring voter ID’s to vote, making
fewer voting machines and poll workers available in Democratic than in
Republican districts, keeping polls open longer in Republican than Democratic
areas, and the like — Sanders said, that what the Right-wing governors and
state legislatures who are passing these laws are doing is “outrageous beyond
belief. They are attacking the very basis of democracy.”
Sanders said he’d just asked Willner’s
question to a staff member of Attorney General Eric Holder, and he said the
answer he got was that they’re fighting this on a state-by-state basis,
challenging the most egregious regulations in court. But, he added, he thinks
both Obama and Holder need to do more. “They are not raising this issue as it
should be raised,” Sanders said. “The Republicans are threatening five million
people with the loss of their vote. Right-wing people are using a variety of
tactics to attack so-called ‘voter fraud,’ when there is virtually no voter
fraud in the U.S. I believe that we have to raise the profile on these
outrageous attacks on voters’ rights.”
