Bernie Sanders addresses Oxford University

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, it's great to see so many of you here today as we welcome Senator Bernie Sanders for a speech and questions. I think this is the first absolutely full capacity event we've covered since before, so it's great to see. all of you here today Bernie Sanders is a senior United States Senator from Vermont and the longest-serving independent senator in the history of the United States Congress. A self-described democratic socialist Saunders contested the Democratic Party's presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020. The senator's new book It's Okay to Be Angry About Capitalism came out earlier this week We are delighted to welcome Senator Sanders back to the union to discuss his book and his vision for the future the senator will give some opening remarks about the book before moving to a moderated audience q a um 100 Copies of the book, including 15 signed copies, will be for sale at the Goodwin Library after the event to be placed there and have the opportunity to buy one.

It's okay to be angry about capitalism. It's okay to want something better. Bernie Sanders takes on the one percent. and exposes a system that is rigged against the rest of us, where a handful of oligarchs have never done so well with more money than Nick has spent in a thousand lifetimes in a majority fight to survive, we have a decent standard of living. seems like a pipe dream to everyone, how can we accept that three billionaires control more wealth in the bottom half of our society, that our political system allows the super rich to buy elections or that our energy system rewards the people who cause the climate crisis ? continues we must demand change and this is where change begins it is okay to be angry at capitalism from the vision of what would be possible if a political revolution took place if we finally recognized that economic rights are human rights and worked to create a society that provides you this is not some utopian utopian fantasy this is a democracy as we should know it is really too much to ask ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming Senator Bernie Sanders thank you thank you thank you thank you for inviting I want to be with you and I want to have a little of time to tell you what the book is about.

In my opinion, my perception of politics has to do with three main factors and each of them is quite difficult. Number one may seem easy but it is not, it is to go into our hearts and say what is happening in the world we live in and often what is happening in the world we live in is not what you see on television or read in the newspaper. quite the opposite in my country and obviously I'm much more familiar with the economy and politics of the United States than the United Kingdom, but today in my country more than 60 percent of the American people live paycheck to paycheck, you know all what that means?

From paycheck to paycheck, my brother, who is here somewhere, and I grew up in a family that lived paycheck to paycheck, and what it means today in America is that people go out and work, and they often work hard and many times. Sometimes they work long hours, but at the same time At the end of that week when they get their paycheck, there is nothing left and if during that week their car breaks down, they may not have the money to fix the call and get to work , if you can't go to work you get fired and then you have no income, unlike the UK we don't have a national healthcare system and if someone gets sick the medical bill can be very high and people who live off the salary They literally have to decide whether to go to the doctor or take their children. to the doctor or not, and we have about 500,000 Americans every year who go bankrupt with healthcare-related bills, and when someone ends up in the hospital and gets a bill for a hundred thousand dollars, a lot of people can't pay it and file for bankruptcy.

As a result, in the United States rents are going up for working people in many communities across the country and if you're paying a certain amount and you're just buying, your landlord says, "Well, I'm sorry, we have to increase your rent by 25 ". Well, you can't afford it, what are you doing right? You will have to move, go from one apartment to another, and what happens to your son who is in school in the neighborhood, well, your son has to get up, he has to go to a The new school readjustment and it is a bit difficult for the child to live paycheck to paycheck nowadays, whether in the United Kingdom or the United States, it is enormously stressful and one of the points we raise in the book of which We don't talk often enough in America is our life expectancy.

You know, when you talk about what our goal is as human beings, what we all want to do, and in general, most of us want to live a long, happy, productive life, right? Nobody wants to die young, nobody you know wants to sit around. in front. of a television all their lives no one wants to be miserable some of us are but that's not what we want we want long, happy and productive lives but in my country right now and this is before covert greed has taken its terrible toll on around the world We have lost more than a million Americans before covid life expectancy in the United States was lower than in most other industrialized countries and in many parts of the United States life expectancy before covert coverage has decreased, why is it so good?

What doctors tell us is that people are dying from diseases of despair, everyone knows what that means, anyone knows what that means, what diseases of despair are about, it has a lot to do with hopelessness, so If someone had a good job then they would work in a factory and earn good wages and that the factory closes maybe they go to China maybe they just close for whatever reason and you have another job for half or two thirds of the salary if you can't pay health care if you cannot afford to send your child to college if you are concerned that your children and in general in the United States today, the younger generation have a lower standard of living than their parents and you look to around you and you say: my life is not going anywhere, my children's life could be worse than my life I'm going to take the bottle I'm going to drink a lot so we see a lot of people becoming addicted to alcohol becoming alcoholics we are seeing terrible and ferocious numbers in terms of drugs in the United States that we lost in the hundreds of thousands of Americans last year to overdoses and addiction in the United States is a very, very serious problem that we are now struggling to figure out how to address and, in addition of drug, alcohol and tobacco addiction, we are seeing increases in Suicide and suicidal ideation and covid, for various reasons, has made the bad situation much worse, but it was already there even before, so in the midst of an economy where we see working class families struggling and more than 60 percent living paycheck to paycheck, we are also seeing another phenomenon and that is that the people at the top in the United States have never had it so good.

There is more income and wealth inequality in the United States today than there has ever been before. Now we don't talk much about that and one. One of the points of this book is not only to talk about those issues but to try to explain why we don't talk about those issues because perhaps the most important crisis we face is not all the crises we know but the fact that we are not dealing with them. with the crisis, we are leaving them aside for particular reasons, any case in America today, I think it is quite incredible and scandalously, three people own more wealth than the bottom half of American society, the top one percent own more wealth than the bottom 92 percent of the night.

When I was a kid a few years ago in America, you know, the time of George Washington, George and I worked together, CEOs, you know, there's nothing new about the fact that business owners make more money than their workers. , nothing new, that's always been the case, but Back then, 70 or 80 years ago, the gap between the CEO, the head of the company, and the job was about 20 to 1. The guy who ran the company He earned 20 times more money than the average worker and, over the years, that gap has grown wider and wider and now in the United States the boss of large corporations earns 400 times more than the average employer in that corporation, Everyone knows that people are angry in America, and I'm sure you see that anger on television, but one reason why People Are Angry is that if you're a worker in America, in terms of wages and income, in reality you have made almost no progress in the last 50 years and here is a surprising fact that is not talked about much and it is in the last 50 years.

As you all know, there has been a revolution in technology. I was mayor of the city of Burlington in 1981. That's when I was elected. I served until 1989, when I joined the City Council as mayor. There were no computers or printers. There certainly wasn't any email, so there has been a revolution over the last 40 or 50 years in technology that has made all workers in the United States and the United Kingdom significantly more productive and yet, despite of that increase in productivity, today the weekly wage of the average American worker in inflation-adjusted dollars is less than 50 years ago obtained that great increase in productivity in real inflation represented dollars people earn less there was a study done by the Rand corporation which is certainly not a leftist group and what is being said is that in the last 50 years in the United States there has been a redistribution of wealth from 55 to 0 trillion dollars from the bottom 90 percent top one percent, so what we're seeing is a country where the people at the top have never had It's so good that the middle class is shrinking, the working class is struggling and at the bottom of the ladder we have today in the United States over 500,000 homeless people in the United States and this book has a whole chapter on health care and I hope you study it. because I understand very well that the NHS here is having its problems and some people are looking to the United States as perhaps a solution to the problems.

My strong suggestion is that that is the wrong place to look, so I point out that health care The health care crisis in America in terms of its unaffordability, in terms of the fact that more than 60,000 people a year die because they don't they go to the doctor on time because they can't afford it, it's part of the overall crisis, so we have Once again, the people at the top never ever did better. The middle class is shrinking. The working class fights. The people below are in very serious problems. We had a lot of children in America who are literally going hungry and we are trying to deal with that in various ways, but that's the current reality, what else is happening in the US economy?

I'm sure there are overlapping similarities here in the UK, we have different countries and many things are different, but there are also many similarities. Another important development in terms of what is happening in the United States is a significant increase in ownership concentration. Do you know what I mean by that? What I mean by this is that once upon a time in the United States and around the world someone massacred a company. He had a business, you had a business, someone closed the business. What has happened in recent years is that large corporations have created other corporations and then consolidated with corporations from other countries and merged with other corporations, so that right now in our country, sector after sector.

Whether it's agriculture, whether it's Wall Street and financial services, whether it's media, whether it's transportation, in virtually every sector of American society we see a handful of large corporations dominating that sector, which makes it very easier if there is no real competition to participate in pricing, which is exactly what is happening. Now in the United States we have inflation not as bad as what you have. We believe that the studies we have seen say that more than half of the cost of inflation has nothing to do with war. in Ukraine it has nothing to do with the breakdown of China's supply chains or whatever, it has everything to do with corporate greed and what these big corporations have done is use the war in Ukraine, use the breakdown of supply chains, which is real and has an impact, use it as an excuse to raise their prices, which is why in the United States our people have paid very high prices for gasoline at the pump.

It turns out that Exxon Mobil made $200 billion in profits last year. Food processes are going up. It turns out that the major food corporations made huge profits, it turns out that the major real estate companies that own apartments make huge profits, so under thepretext of supply chain problems or war, what they have done in that confusion is increase prices substantially and make record profits. and ordinary people are left further and further behind. I'll tell you a personal story that I've been involved in, my office was involved in last year, the last two years and about a dozen strikes where workers stood up, went on strike and we've tried to provide what assistance we could and at times we have been helpful and, uh, what we learned when we got involved in these situations is that invariably the corporation that the workers were striking was making very high profits, maybe even record profits. .

Sydney, you think well and then what they would do is go to the workers and say, well, we want to cut your benefits or we won't give you a pay rise in line with inflation and you sit back and think. Why with record profits would they want to do that? And it is one case after another. I will never forget that there were women in California, mostly women who worked in a large bakery owned by a billionaire family and their demands were minimal and the company fought for them, I think they finally won the job or they won most of their demands and you started to realize two things, number one, was not the money they could pay, but the power that told the workers in a union, you think.

If you stand up and oppose me, you will get something. I have news for you I have the power you don't and I don't care how just your causes are I don't care how much money I make how much you need it you won't get it because I have the power that before The lesson number one that came across my desk loud and clear and the second lesson we learned is that when we dealt with company I didn't even make the decisions. and then it turns out, after a little study, you discover that in the United States there are three, one, two, three Wall Street firms, BlackRock Vanguard and State Street.

Has anyone heard of BlackRock? Okay, it's not a well-known company, no it's not. No, you have those three investment companies that have combined assets of controlling assets, they are not owners, they control 20 trillion dollars, they have properties all over the world and it turns out that in the United States they control, they are the largest shareholders. They do not control, they are the main shareholders of 95 percent of the SP 500. So, when you talk about power and concentration of ownership, you combine three Wall Street firms that are the main shareholders of 95 percent of the main corporations. In America, a few thousand people make incredible economic decisions, so that's concentration of ownership and then the third concern I have about the role that big money plays in America has to do with our political system, which is different from the political system of a few years ago.

The Supreme Court of the United States, which as many of you know now is a very right-wing court, several years ago, several years ago, issued the decision called Citizens United and essentially the case was that people from an organization called Citizens United joined together. and he said look, we want to put money into the political process we are American citizens we believe in freedom of speech and we want to express our speech in the elections and right now they said that there are laws that limit the amount of money we can spend and therefore these laws They deny us Americans our freedom of speech, which is protected by the Constitution, and the Supreme Court said you're right, you can buy democracy, you can buy elections, that's your constitutional right, so what happened to that decision?

What is called super Pacs emerged, I don't know how many people know what they are. The Pacs are a political action committee and a Super PAC is a different type, it's an independent committee, so to speak, and right now in the United States billionaires can contribute the same amount of money. as they want, often without revealing it to this committee that will then buy ads and do all kinds of political work to defeat the candidates that the billionaires don't like and support the candidates that they do like, so that today in the United States we have the best democracy that money can buy and it is a very serious problem.

I'll give you a personal example, if you like, over the last few years I've worked very, very hard to try to elect young progressives to the United States House of Representatives and we've had some success and what people are doing now with the money very consciously, everyone knows this, they have formed a Super PAC to make sure that they try to defeat those candidates, often those candidates, often our people that we elect are young people of color, often women of color, but they are advocating to the workers in Congress, what is making the big money interests uncomfortable and what they want to do is show an example that young people from working class backgrounds who fight for working class people cannot succeed and are going to spend millions and millions of dollars trying to defeat these people, so that's what we're dealing with in terms of politics, very rich people who have an enormous impact on the political process.

The last issue that concerns me is the role of the media in American society. Now the media is different from yours. In the United States there are eight large media conglomerates that control about 90 percent of what the American people see here. Read about 90 percent of the contact that people are exposed to comes from eight large media conglomerates obviously owned by very, very rich people Now in the United States we don't have censorship, I'm on television every other day, etc., but what Yes, there is a situation in which almost all media outlets are limited to the types of questions and topics they are allowed to discuss. and one of the points that we raise at the beginning of the books and that I raise at the beginning of the book is what is real politics as opposed to media politics and I want everyone to appreciate that media politics is about the surveys, it has to do with gossip. has to do: this person doesn't like this person and this person is upset about this and look at the nonsense that member of Congress said that doesn't mean anything to anyone, the real problems, i.e. what's happening to workers and why they are almost never discussed and never discussed because the people who own the society don't really want that discussion to take place.

Do you think the billionaire class, America's ruling class, wants a discussion about the grotesque level of incoming wealth inequality? Do you want? a discussion about why so many people live paycheck to paycheck do you want a discussion about why we in the United States spend twice as much per capita on health care as you and every other major nation on Earth and yet we have 85 million people uninsured or underinsured you think they want that discussion, they don't, then politics becomes like a reality television show, it's gossip, it's humor, it's stupidity, it's many things, but it's not a substantive discussion about the problems that the American people face.

The book not only

addresses

those issues but then says, "Okay, where do we want to go?" because politics is not just about understanding where we are today. It is also equally important to have a vision of the future that goes beyond tomorrow, so today we are in a world in important nations like the United States in the United Kingdom we have extraordinary wealth, we have technology that, through artificial intelligence, Robotics and everything else is creating more and more wealth, extraordinary advances, the question we should ask ourselves is not whether we cut programs, but whether we deny workers the income they need.

The question we should ask ourselves is why don't we live in a society where all our people have a decent standard of living? It is a utopian vision, it is not, it really is not. It's not 1820, this is not 1920. This is 2023. And if you think about it for five minutes, don't you think that in the United States and the United Kingdom we have different health care systems, but don't you think that any of our countries and others Countries around the world are capable of producing doctors, nurses and other medical personnel and the technology we need to provide quality care to all people for free is truly utopian.

I don't believe it. Is it utopian to say that education and you are sitting here in one of the great universities of the world, that education is an inherent right of all people, that everyone has the right to receive a good quality and free education, regardless of the income you were born with, is that really a radical idea in the United States if you want to be a doctor, it's not uncommon for you to leave school with 500,000 in debt if you're a minority kid who comes from a family that doesn't has a lot of money. It's not unusual for you to have it. drop out of college forty fifty thousand dollars and then you have to figure out how you're going to pay off that debt over the years.

Do you think it is really a radical idea to say that education should be a right of all people and not just a privilege and what the book talks about, taking up a very important speech that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, one of our great presidents , he delivered in 1944. Now in 1944, as everyone knows, there were the myths about the end of the World War and everyone's attention was on the The war and what he said in that speech never received much attention, but it was a very radical and profound and what he said, obviously paraphrasing it, was that we in the United States are very proud of our political system, we have a Bill of Rights that guarantees people political rights the right to vote freedom of speech freedom of religion freedom of assembly a lot of political freedoms that we have protected by the Constitution of the United States, that's great, but then he asked this question that I want everyone to think about, you know, I'm sure they talk a lot about freedom, right, all the world talks about being, what freedom is, how we can become free, etc., what Roosevelt said in 1944 is that people cannot be truly free unless they have basic economic resources. economic rights, so right now, if you are working 50 or 60 hours a week to support your family, are you really free?

That's what freedom is about if you can't afford to go to a doctor when you're sick or when your child. What's sick is that freedom, if today you're in a job like tens of millions of people, where you don't have power over the work you do, you go to get a job in a company, work in a factory and someone asks you for forgiveness. you're gone I don't like you you're out you're not doing a good job I didn't do anything wrong you're out of here you're not going to get a raise and by the way you're going to do it exactly like I tell you to do and if you don't you're out of here you are a cog in a machine you don't like it there is the door and tens of millions of workers live in those conditions are you free in a It makes a deep sense when you go to a job you hate and you do it for a reason: you need income to support yourself alive, so this is the year 2023.

With all kinds of technology, all kinds of wealth and it's time for us. rethink many of those issues to understand that in today's world, if we use the available technology appropriately, we can provide a decent standard of living for all people and that is the challenge we face. You are all aware of the explosion and uh. increase in the use of artificial intelligence and robotics, who will make the decision about who benefits from this technological explosion? Nobody denies that in the United States, I am sure that it will also be here where tens and tens of millions of jobs will be created over the next 20 or 30 years. are going to end, people will no longer be able to do the work that they are doing today, who makes that decision and what happens to the workers who are displaced, so if a robot comes in and does your job, that means it's really good news because your work week is going to go down from 40 to 50 hours now to 20 hours you will benefit from that order the people who own the technology will be the only beneficiaries of that where is that discussion about who makes those decisions?

Ultimately, what the book is about is creating a vibrant democracy where workers have a say in the future of this country, which is certainly not the case right now. Okay, I've probably talked more than I intended. I think I mentioned one or two. problems uh and I would be more than happy to answer questions. I'm not sure how we should proceed here, but uh uh, thank you.