..... to hurt this nation than bin Laden could ever dream of." - Robert Scheer
More from the Democracy Now! piece with Scheer, Dean Baker and Bernie Sanders:
JUAN GONZALEZ: Bob Scheer, the issue also of this rush to pass this legislation—I’m reminded somewhat of the PATRIOT Act after 9/11: an immense tragedy occurs, and immediately they try to rush through legislation without many of the members of Congress even having a handle as to what it really contains.
ROBERT SCHEER: Oh, it’s absolutely outrageous, and we can’t let them get away with it. I mean, consider that Paulson was the head of Goldman Sachs, OK? He knew about credit swaps. He knew about hybrid instruments. He knew all of this stuff. And now he’s the guy that says Congress has to give him a blank check, it has to be a pure bill? Nonsense!
This is our money. Why isn’t this money used to help people who are going to lose their houses? You miss two, three payments, and they’re going to foreclose on you; then they say, “Well, we hope the banks will work out new agreements.” Nonsense! Do a freeze on foreclosures. Stop the bleeding. Have a year to let it settle, and force the banks to come to agreements.
You know, but, I mean, the idea that they didn’t know what was going on, well, this is a Ponzi scheme of their creation, and they thought they would bail before it hit the fan. That’s what they thought. They’d be gone, and someone else would be blamed. They’d have their golden parachutes. I don’t know why we’re not considering criminal charges against these people. They have done more to hurt this nation than bin Laden could ever dream of.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Robert Scheer, we’re also joined on the telephone by Senator Bernie Sanders, the Independent of Vermont, elected to the Senate in 2006 after serving sixteen years in the House, longest-serving Independent member of Congress in American history. Senator Sanders says the middle class shouldn’t be forced to pay for a crisis created by what he calls the Bush administration’s deregulatory fever and Wall Street’s insatiable greed.
Senator Sanders, welcome to Democracy Now! Well, the watchword these days is—or words, I should say—“too big to fail.”
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Well, Amy, that’s right. And I think if it’s too big to fail, it probably is too big to exist. And, by the way, among many other things, what we’re doing now with the Bank of America picking up Countrywide and picking up Merrill Lynch, you’re creating another institution which is too big to fail, so that, among many other things, in my view, that we have got to do is to start breaking up these very, very large multinational corporations who continuously put us in this position.
But my main concern—I’ve only got a few minutes here—my main concern is twofold. I mean, for the longest period of time, up to literally a few weeks ago, we had our friends in the Bush administration telling us that the fundamentals of the economy are strong, everything is just fine. And now they tell us we’re on the verge of a major economic meltdown. We’ve got to give Wall Street a $700 billion bailout. And, by the way, of course, it is not going to be the people who have benefited, the people at the very, very top who have benefited financially from Bush’s reckless economic policies who are going to pick up the bailout; it is going to be the middle class, which has been suffering for the last eight years.
So the first point that we have to make is, if a bailout is necessary, it is not going to be, if I have anything to say about it, a working people picking up the cost of this; it is going to be the top one-tenth of one percent, who earn more than the bottom 50 percent. It is going to be all of these people who have made out very, very well under Bush’s reckless policies. So that’s my main concern right now.
Obviously, also we have to ensure that the assets purchased from the banks are realistically discounted, so that we don’t get ripped off in the process, and we have to require that taxpayers receive equity stakes in the bailed-out companies.
Also, I think that we have got to be—we on the left have got to be thinking big and learn a little bit from our right-wing friends who are able to pivot on a dime. For years now, they’ve told us that we can’t afford—that the government providing healthcare to all people is just unimaginable; it can’t be done. We don’t have the money to rebuild our infrastructure. We don’t have the money to wipe out poverty. We can’t do it. But all of a sudden, yeah, we do have $700 billion for a bailout of Wall Street. So, my view is that, included in what we do, there should be a significant stimulus package, a really significant one, which addresses healthcare, which addresses sustainable energy, which addresses the infrastructure, which creates substantial number of jobs, addressing many of the long-term unmet needs of this country.
Obviously, also, we’ve got to understand why we got into this business. I was just re-reading a speech that I gave in the House. I was on the House Banking Committee in 1999, when Glass-Steagall legislation was done away with and the walls were broken down. And I think many of the things that I said and a number of other people said at that time about what would happen, in fact, has happened. So you’ve got to go back to re-regulating not only financial services, but you’ve also got to look at energy trading as well, which is certainly one of the reasons that people are paying $3.70 for a gallon of gas today. So I think those are some of the directions that we’ve got to move in the next few weeks. .......(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/9/22/sen_bernie_sanders_robert_scheer_and 
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