How Republicans have made a science out of white working-class resentment

[UglyGreed]

12. Bernie's interview with Thom Hartman

[Thom Hartmann]: I remember it well, Bernie. In fact I miss it. It's beautiful, I'm looking out--we live in a house boat on the river and I'm looking out across the water at the shore and it's all covered--it's just beautiful. It's a winter wonderland. But you can't move a car in the city. It just shuts down the city. Anyhow, Bush said he is going to loan the automakers some money but he is going to attach some strings to it. Your thoughts?

[Bernie Sanders]: well--before we jump into that, and that's certainly a very important issue--you know what, I'm hearing in my state of Vermont, and I think it's true all over this country, Thom, and we can't underestimate it, there is an enormous amount of fear and apprehension about what's happening in the economy. And the degree to which things are moving so rapidly that a year or two years ago, a year ago, the Bush Administration was talking about how – you remember this? – “the fundamentals of the economy are sound. The economy is robust, everything is wonderful” and now we're looking into the abyss and what we are seeing, and we can’t forget about this, is right now I know people, you know people, people are losing their jobs. 500,000 people lost their jobs just last month. Unemployment is soaring. People are losing their homes and when people lose their homes and their jobs, they're losing their health insurance. People are putting money into savings accounts and investment accounts for their retirement and that's gone. Or a substantial part of that has gone as the stock market has gone down. People trying to save up money for their kids to get a college education. That's going down. This is a real, real tragedy.

And nobody really knows exactly what's going to happen tomorrow. So I think clearly what we have to do as a nation is understand how we got to where we are. Make sure we never repeat this again and then figure out in a very bold way of how we revitalize this economy, how we create good-paying jobs and we don't repeat the mistakes of the past. How we get rid of--once and for all--this extreme right wing Alan Greenspan, George Bush type of ideology which has essentially said that if you do everything that the rich and large corporations want, suddenly somehow it's all going to trickle down to ordinary people and the economy will be prosperous and clearly that's a crock. It hasn't worked and we have to learn that lesson very profoundly.

The immediate concerns that I have, Thom, is that I voted-- I think as many of the listeners know--against this bailout for a dozen different reasons. But one of them was—

[Thom Hartmann]: The bail out the banks.

[Bernie Sanders]: The bail out the banks, and one of them was that I didn't think the middle class and working families who have seen a decline in their income under Bush should have to bail out Wall Street when those guys have made huge increases in their income and wealth. But more importantly right now the Bush people have spent -- I think the last count something like 335 billion of the first tranche and it's amazing, amazing, how little oversight or accountability we have from these financial institutions that we're bailing out. You know, if you came to me, and you said, "Bernie, I need some money", I'd say, "Okay Thom, I'll give you some money but this is what you got to do with it, A, B, C and D, and I'm going to watch you. But apparently ABC did something last week.

They asked all of the banks that had received this bailout and they said, "tell me the loans that you're making, tell me what are doing with the money". Only one of the banks responded, so we really don't know whether they're giving out--or continuing to give out--outrageous bonuses, paying dividends. We don't know if they're making loans to small businesses, if they're dealing with foreclosures. If they're really trying to get our economy stimulated and create jobs, doing the things that this bailout was supposed to do! We don't even know that. And the idea of the Bush administration, perhaps asking for another $350 billion, is totally incomprehensible.

To my mind to add insult to injury, as you may have seen in the papers today, the Fed came out dealing with this horrendous situation with credit cards. And I was on the House financial services committee for many years and we dealt with this issue--I raised this issue, I should say, we didn't deal with it--and what you have is credit card companies ripping off people in the most unbelievable ways. Through bait and switch tactics, saying "sign up and will give you zero interest, 2% interest", then of course they end up changing the interest rates anytime they wanted, late fees are extraordinarily high. Coming up with all kinds of ways to raise money from unsuspecting consumers.

And then the Fed comes out and says, okay we should do A,B,C, and D, all of which are fine ideas, but then they say that they shouldn't go into effect until July 2010, which is basically absurd. We have to deal with the credit card crisis and the ripping off of people, especially from many of the same institutions that are receiving bailouts from taxpayers who are now getting money from the Fed at almost 0 interest and are now charging in some cases consumers on their credit cards 25 or 30%. So that's an issue that has got to be dealt with.

The other concern and major issue that people are going to see a lot of action on in January before Obama becomes president, but certainly immediately after, is this stimulus package which I strongly, strongly support. I am not in favor of bailing out Wall Street with no strings attached but I am in favor of rebuilding our infrastructure to create millions, creating millions of good jobs, dealing with the crumbling of our bridges, our roads, our water systems. And also to a significant degree -- and this is one of the great challenges that the Obama administration and all of us are going to face--breaking our dependency on fossil fuel and foreign oil, moving to energy efficiency and wind, solar, geothermal, biomass and other sustainable energies. And doing that, in the process, creating millions of good paying jobs.

We also have to be mindful in this economic downturn that we don't want to forget about people falling--the most vulnerable people in our society; the kids, the elderly, and the sick--falling through the cracks and so we have to make sure that nobody in America goes cold, nobody in America is sleeping out on the street. We have to worry about the cities and towns.

But bottom line here, I think, in this moment of great economic uncertainty, the time is now for the American people, for the president of the United States, the new president, for the Congress to start rethinking this trickle down ideology of tax breaks for billionaires, unfettered free trade, anti-trade-unionism, and all of the other aspects of a right wing ideology which has clearly failed.

[Thom Hartmann]: Yeah. Even their approach to the auto bailout is--you know--we need to drive down wages to make this -- it's a race to the bottom.

[Bernie Sanders]: Thom, that is exactly right and anyone who thinks that a lot of the Republican opposition to this automobile bailout -- when the Republicans defeated it a couple of weeks ago -- didn't have a lot to do with trying to destroy the United Automobile Workers and to in fact drive down wages--which are already plummeting in the automobile industry -- is sorely mistaken.

Now some listeners may say, "Well you know, frankly I don't live in Detroit, I don't make cars -- why should I worry about it?" Here's why you should worry about it. Historically the gold standard for manufacturing workers was the automobile industry. Workers there earned good wages. They had good benefits. They had a strong union. They had a pension program, and so forth. And by raising that standard, it meant that in non-union manufacturing in the state of Vermont, or the state of Arizona, you had a standard by which people had to respond to. And if in your gold standard area wages go down, so that people are entering the automobile industry now making 14 bucks an hour with lower benefits, how do you think people are going to make a living wage working in a non-union shop elsewhere in this country?

And you're quite right--what we're talking about here is a collapse of the middle class. A race to the bottom.

Our big money interests tell us that in China they only make $.50 an hour, how dare you ask for a living wage for your family? So what we have seen under Bush is that race to the bottom, a growing gap between the rich and the poor, an increase in poverty, and those are the kind of, kinds of trends that we really have got to reverse if we're going to save the middle class of this country.

- See more at: http://www.thomhartmann.com/blog/2008/12/transcript-bernie-sanders-economy-bailouts-19-december-2008#sthash.ycCZOEUK.dpuf