Prepared Remarks; Wall Street and the Economy

[leftcoastmountains]

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Speaking a few subway stops away from the epicenter of the global financial crisis, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders promised to remake the financial system to serve America’s working families. Below are his prepared remarks. Watch the live stream here.

The American people are catching on. They understand that something is profoundly wrong when, in our country today, the top one-tenth of 1 percent own almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent and when the 20 richest people own more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans – half of our population. They know that the system is rigged when the average person is working longer hours for lower wages, while 58 percent of all new income goes to the top 1 percent.

They also know that a handful of people on Wall Street have extraordinary power over the economic and political life of our country. As most people know, in the 1990s and later, the financial interests spent billions of dollars in lobbying and campaign contributions to force through Congress the deregulation of Wall Street, the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and the weakening of consumer protection laws in states.

They spent this money in order to get the government off their backs and to show the American people what they could do with that new-won freedom. Well, they sure showed the American people. In 2008, the greed, recklessness and illegal behavior on Wall Street nearly destroyed the U.S. and global economy.

For more...

https://berniesanders.com/statement-by-senator-bernie-sanders-on-wall-street-and-the-economy/

[eridani]

1. 'Break Em Up!': Sanders Speech Takes Aim at Big Bank Greed

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/01/05/break-em-sanders-speech-takes-aim-big-bank-greed

If elected president, Sanders will ask his Treasury secretary to create a "'too big to fail' list of commercial banks, shadow banks and insurance companies whose failure would pose a catastrophic risk to the United States economy without a taxpayer bailout"—and within a year, he vows, he will break up those entities.

"A handful of huge financial institutions simply have too much economic and political power over this country," Sanders said during the address, which was held at a venue in downtown Manhattan. "If a bank is too big to fail, it is too big to exist...When it comes to Wall Street reform, that must be our bottom line."

Among other proposals, the Vermont senator threw his support behind a measure introduced by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial and investment banking.

"Let’s be clear: this legislation, introduced by my colleague Senator Elizabeth Warren aims at the heart of the shadow banking system," he stated.

Sanders' chief rival, Hillary Clinton, opposes that measure. On Monday, Clinton's campaign attempted to preempt Sanders' Wall Street speech by calling on the progressive senator to endorse her proposal for banking reform.

In response, Sanders' communications director, Michael Briggs, took aim at Gary Gensler, Clinton's chief financial adviser. "Senator Sanders won’t be taking advice on how to regulate Wall Street from a former Goldman Sachs partner and a former Treasury Department official who helped Wall Street rig the system," Briggs said.