Chapo Trap House - Bonus: The Bernie Sanders Interview

Episode Date: October 4, 2019

Continuing Chapo's coverage of the race for the White House, Virgil sits down with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders to discuss current affairs.

Hi everyone, this is Virgil Texas. As part of Chapo Trap House's continuing interview series with the 2020 presidential candidates, I recently sat down with Senator Bernie Sanders. Please enjoy. Two weeks ago at a town hall in Nevada, you spoke with a veteran who is suffering from Huntington's disease, who has health insurance tricare, but it was no longer being accepted, and who is over $100,000 in medical debt, and who told you his despair was so great he would kill himself.

What was going through your head when you were talking to that person? Outrage. Outrage that in this particular case, a man who had put his life on the line to defend our country was thinking of killing himself, because as it turns out, he's being hounded by bill collectors. That's the state doesn't answer his phone. And since then, we've been talking to people all across this country whose credit rating has been shot.

We have 500,000 people who go bankrupt. Can you imagine the insanity of a system where you're diagnosed with cancer, and because you're diagnosed with cancer or another serious illness, you go bankrupt? Does anybody think that that is not insane? And we are the only major country on earth that doesn't guarantee health care to all people. I intend to change that. I've seen videos of other people who go up to you with town halls and they give the most

depressing stories, the stories that we're all familiar with at this point that medical debt or other kinds of debt have driven them to despair, bankruptcy, or even to prison. And there's something almost futile about that, that this system is so impossible for your average person to exist in that, well, screw it, I guess I've got to ask Bernie Sanders what the hell to do. You've talked about being an organizer in chief. How do you empower, how do we make that change? Let me answer that in two ways.

That's a great question. I want to answer it. But I want everybody to know that we are the only major country on earth that doesn't guarantee health care to all people. This is how crazy and dysfunctional the system is. It is indefensible. We spend twice as much per person on health care as the Canadians or any other people around the world, 500,000 people go bankrupt, 30,000 people die, one out of five people

cannot afford the prescription drugs that doctors prescribe. Why is all that going on? You know why? So that the health care industry can make $100 billion in profit last year. That's why it's going on. And right now, the health care industry with all their billions of dollars running ads all over the country, putting funding into phony think tanks, trying to defeat me and Medicare for all.

So that's issue number one. Issue number two you ask about organizer in chief. And I use that because obviously president is commander in chief in the military and I will accept that responsibility. But to be organizer in chief means the following. And I'm the only candidate for president who will tell you this. And that is the system that we have right now in this country economically and politically is not only rigged.

It is profoundly corrupt, profoundly corrupt. You're dealing with crooks on Wall Street who destroyed the economy 11 years ago and then got bailed out. You're talking about an insurance industry that makes billions out of human suffering drug companies that fix prices of fossil fuel industry. Think about this. Fuel fuel industry is producing a product. Oh, just happens to be destroying the planet.

Slight problem there, right? Okay. How do we change all that? And the only way we change it is by millions of people becoming involved in an unprecedented grassroots movement. That is what our campaign is about. Every other candidate will probably say they oppose special interests, you know, things like that.

And you're going when you want to eliminate private health insurance, you're going after a multi-billion dollar cash cow that enriches a small number of people. Even if you are elected president, how does everyone else steal themselves for this fight to take down a massive private interest? That is the $64 question. We used to say when I was a kid, $64 is not much anymore. Maybe the $64 billion question, I don't know. You've raised the profound question is how do we change society?

That's certainly what you're asking. And it's not just the healthcare industry, which is enormously powerful, it's the fossil fuel industry. What about the military industrial complex? What about the prison industrial complex? What about the 1% in general whose wealth has soared in the last 30 years while the needs of working families, the wealth of working families have gone down? How do you deal with all this?

With your study history, the only way that real change ever comes about is when millions of people stand up and fight for justice. That's the labor movement, it's the women's movement, it is the civil rights movement, it is the gay rights movement, it's the environmental movement. And when we talk about our campaign uniquely being us, not me, what I mean by that is that no president of the United States, not Bernie Sanders or anybody else, can do it alone. That these people on top are so powerful that the only way we bring them down, the only way we make the kinds of transformation this country absolutely requires is when millions

of people are prepared to stand up and fight back. And as organizer in chief, that's the fight that I will help lead. You've talked in the past about the need for a movement like this, one that is not necessarily tied to electoral politics that's looking past whichever election is right in front of you. How does your campaign contribute to the construction of that movement? What we're doing right now is what we're doing right now. What we are doing and I'm really proud of this, we have revolutionized kind of campaign

fundraising in America. It used to be not so many years ago that what Democrats, forget Republicans, what Democrats did is they had these huge super PACs in which billionaires and corporations put all kinds of money in. They went to wealthy people's homes and they sat down with a bunch of millionaires and billionaires and they left with a few hundred thousand dollars. We've revolutionized that. Our campaign at this point has more individual donors and they're all by and large.

The overwhelming majority are small donations. We have more than any candidate in the history of American politics. We have three million donations over a million individual donors and the overwhelming majority of them are working class people. We have well over a million volunteers in states all over this country and every congressional district in America. So what we are doing is doing exactly the opposite of what Trump wants to do. He's trying to divide us up, we're bringing our people together, black and white and Latino,

Native American, Asian American, gay and straight, a whole thing, immigrant and non-immigrant, to stand up for progressive agenda. And that will last long after my presidency and that is what we need if we're going to take on the power elite in this country. People have a screwed up sense of power today and that's not their fault, that's what they've been told, that's the effects of the spectacle resentment has taken the place of class struggle. How do you reorient people, especially the 100 million odd who don't vote, toward the idea that there are those who labor and there are those who profit?

Fantastic question. And you know, one of the problems that we have is that in most schools, certainly in corporate media and certainly in the United States Congress, we really don't discuss power, do we? We really don't. And we'll talk about healthcare, we'll talk about education. We don't talk about who has the real power in this country and why it is, and just think about this, after all of the great speeches and all the plans that we have heard over

the last 45 years, you know what? Average American worker today in real inflation accounts for dollars is not earning a dime more than he or she did 45 years ago. Meanwhile, massive, we're talking about trillions of dollars going to the top 1% in increased wealth. So what I think is when people do not hear politicians talking about the pain in their lives, all right, we're speaking right now, you've got 87 million people who hesitate going to the doctor because they cannot afford it.

I've talked to God knows too many people who have lost loved ones because they didn't go to the doctor when they want. We're talking to people, we talked to a guy a week ago. He has been paying off his student debt for decades and he's worried they're going to garnish his social security check in order to take money out of that to pay off his student debt. You've got people all over this country who are scared to death about the implications of climate change.

You've got all of these issues out there and politicians don't talk about it and then politicians don't have the guts to get to the root of the problem, who has the power and why are the rich becoming much richer while working people are going nowhere in a hurry. You alluded to this just now for the past 40 plus years, wages have been stagnant, productivity, profits are up, manufacturing, jobs shipped overseas, welfare gutted, costs of education, healthcare, up, public goods, housing, public goods put into private hands. If Mary serves, you were first elected to public office about 40 years ago.

I'm not suggesting you're responsible for these trends, but in your mind, as a question of your view of history, who or what is responsible? I'll tell you what's responsible, this is not an academic question. What is responsible is an unprecedented level of corporate greed and corporate corruption. All of these things, trade agreements, and I oppose all of them, that send good paying jobs to low wage countries, not an accident, huge tax breaks for the wealthiest people in this country, not an accident, massive cuts to education so that young people are forced to assume at the state and federal level, Pell Grants, are forced to assume more

and more of the burden, it's not an accident, breaking up of trade unions, not an accident, making it harder and harder for workers to form a union. This is not an accident, I talk to these guys, I'm what's called a ranking member of the Budget Committee, they come before my committee, and they say, Senator, what we would like is more tax breaks for the very rich and large corporations, in fact we think this is true, large corporations shouldn't pay a nickel in federal taxes, income taxes, oh and by the way, we want you to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and education because we're worried about the deficit, that's from the lips of Wall Street and the corporate elite,

that's what they want, so you're asking me how it happened, that is exactly how it happened, and with the decimation and the attacks against the trade union movement, those folks who were able to fight back are less able to fight back, and by the way, I'm glad to see an increased militancy in the trade union movement, and we have legislation in that would substantially increase membership in unions. We're at the point where even working class people might see the price tag on one of your proposals and think, oh that means higher taxes from me, and I think that's an indication of how dominant the taxpayers' revolt and Reaganomics has been in destroying the idea

that there is a certain profit stream and some amount of that is going to go to workers in the public purse and some amount is just pure profit for a small number of people, and I apologize if this sounds like I'm repeating an earlier question, but how do you make the case that you're thinking about this the wrong way? Well you don't attack, look these issues are not discussed in the corporate media, they're not discussed terribly often in Congress, they're not discussed in schools, so you know why, I understand why people think the way they think. Right now as an example of that, you know as we fight for Medicare for all, the healthcare

industry will spend hundreds of millions of dollars in lies, they'll say oh Bernie Sanders wants to raise your taxes, well as it happens Bernie Sanders wants to do away with all of your premiums, all of your co-payments, all of your deductibles, all of your out of pocket expenses, and Bernie Sanders wants you not to have to pay more than $200 a year for your prescription drugs, which means that Bernie Sanders wants you to pay substantially less for healthcare than you're paying right now, but I've got folks like Joe Biden actually, and the healthcare industry, oh Bernie wants to raise your taxes, saw a woman the other day in Iowa, she is paying $20,000, she was paying, she's on Medicare now, $20,000 a year

in premiums, $20,000, that's okay, hey that's just taxes for the insurance company, that's great, we love that, but if she paid $10,000 more in federal taxes, that would be terrible, that's nonsense. There is a left moment in this country, and people of my generation and the next generation overwhelmingly oppose the way things are. For the youngest, like this is a matter of life and death, and there are a lot of reasons for this, climate change is one, your campaign is one, the election of Trump and the urgency that created is one, but for a lot of people specifically my age, that's the financial

crisis, that's the recession, that's the meltdown of 2008, and Rahm Emanuel famously said never let a crisis go to waste, but the consensus on the left is that Emanuel and Geithner and Somers and the like did let that crisis go to waste, because I entered the job market in 2009, I was six figures in college debt, had no job prospects, but I saw the news that everything was falling apart, that Wall Street guys were about to jump out of the buildings, and I thought okay well you know we have a popular democratic president and a big democratic majority, these are the conditions that made the new deal, but we didn't get anything like that, some analysts are predicting a recession is coming,

what would you have done in 2009, and I guess if there is a recession what would you do? Well you know I'll tell you, in 2009, I and maybe a half a dozen of the United States senators, we went to the White House and met with Obama, I suspect Geithner was there, is Larry Somers, I suspect because I don't remember exactly, his whole financial team, and what we said is you and the Congress have got to take these people on, these people are criminals, these people have destroyed the American economy, now they want a bailout, we have got to take them on and use this opportunity to transform the financial system of this country, we have got to break up these huge financial institutions that have acted illegally

and have so much power, I believe that that was a moment to do that, and it wasn't, and I will tell you right now, just check it out on the website, I will if president break up these huge financial institutions which I believe could once again melt down and cause another very terrible recession. The reasons that people are on the left today, that people are rejecting capitalism, seem at first blush to be different from the conditions that made you when you were a civil rights organizer at the University of Chicago in the 1960s, that was a different milieu than today, but you have so many young left people who are rallying around your campaign, so I want to know this kind of an open question, but how

did your experience with core inform your politics today? Well it was a profound experience, I grew up in a virtually all white neighborhood in Brooklyn New York, it was my, when I went to the University of Chicago, it was not only getting involved in the civil rights movement with African Americans, it was also getting involved in the label movement, it was also getting involved in the peace movement to be honest with you, and as I've said many many times, the University of Chicago is a fine university, I learned a lot in classes, I learned more outside of the classroom, and I met some fantastic people in that community who told me, talked to me a whole lot about

you know their views of the world, and that shaped my politics, and what I believed, what I saw in action then was coalition politics, and I'm a very very strong believer in coalition politics, and that is, it is not just the need to end racism in this country, the need to end sexism in this country, the need to end homophobia in this country, was xenophobia or religious bigotry, it's the need to bring people together, working class people to fight for a government and economy that works for all of us, and not just the one percent, and that's what I am trying to do right this minute. Hurricane Maria, the devastation in Puerto Rico over a thousand deaths, coming over the

heels of decades of wall street pillaging of that country, then you have concentration camps in the southwestern border, ICE raids, devastating minority communities across the country, I think these are all symptoms of the same crisis, of crisis of capitalism and an ecological crisis, and people who are younger than I am, the Greta generation, they see these images and they realize they have not been born into a comfortable existence even in this country, how do you avoid the bad future that every day it looks like we're careening towards? Look, I wish I could give you a magical answer to make you feel great and totally confident

in the future, I can't. We got an idiot in the White House who thinks the climate change is a hoax when the scientists are telling us that it is the existential threat facing our planet, and if there's any silver lining in this Virgil, it is, you know, I've brought forth by far the most comprehensive plan to tackle climate change, and maybe just maybe if we can rally people all over the world and we saw just last week millions of people marching in countries in every continent on earth, maybe if we had strong United States leadership and that's what I would provide as president, my message to the entire world is, you know what, we're spending a trillion

and a half dollars every single year on weapons of destruction designed to kill each other. Maybe just maybe we might want to pool those resources led by the United States to combat our common enemy, which is climate change. But this is a frightening, I mean you talked about Puerto Rico, we could talk about Katrina, we could talk about what happened in the Bahamas, you could talk about Charleston, South Carolina. It is impossible for any sane person not to understand the crisis that we're facing. And I will, you know, my proposal is the boldest, it will create up to 20 million jobs, it will tell the fossil fuel industry they cannot continue to destroy the planet.

This will be my last question, in 2015 you quoted Pope Francis decrying the cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly human goal. What is the goal of an economy? The goal of an economy is to create a better life for all of us, all right. It is very much the opposite of Trump's view of life and his friends, which is, you know, a lot of the billionaire class, not all, who think that greed and lying and cheating and stealing is the function of human life. I make as much money as I want, I make billions, I step all over people, I use my power to

cut social security, Medicare and Medicaid. I believe that the goal of human life, that you are richer emotionally as a human being when we have community, when we care about each other, when we love each other, when we are compassionate, not when we're stepping on other people, when we bring people together despite superficial differences like the color of our skin or our sexual orientation. And we create that kind of, what Dr. King called it, what he called it, a community of love. I mean, that is the goal and that means making sure that all of our people have a decent

standard of living, which we can certainly do, that we lead the world in addressing the terrible poverty that exists in the developed world, that we bring the planet together to fight climate change. When we do all of those things, we become better human beings. I think we become happier human beings, more satisfied human beings. That's what I think has to happen. Thank you so much, Senator. Virgil, thank you very much.

Did you read the trespass notices? Did you keep off the grass? Did you shuffle off the pavement just to let your baddest pass? Did you learn to keep your mouth shut? We have seen and never heard. Did you learn to be obedient and jump to, add a word, jump to, add a word, jump to, add a word? Did you ever demand any answer?

The who and the what and the reason why? Did you ever question the set up? Did you stand aside and let them choose while you took second best? Did you let them skim the cream off and then give to you the rest? Did you settle for the shoddy? And did you think it right to let them rob you right and left and never make a fight? Never make a fight.