[ As the new chair of a powerful Senate committee, the
reënergized progressive leader is once again targeting the corporate
plutocracy.]
[[link removed]]

BERNIE SANDERS’S NEW CAMPAIGN: TAKING ON BIG PHARMA AND STARBUCKS
 
[[link removed]]


 

John Cassidy
February 14, 2023
The New Yorker
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ As the new chair of a powerful Senate committee, the reënergized
progressive leader is once again targeting the corporate plutocracy. _


Bernie Sanders , photogism

 

Senator Bernie Sanders
[[link removed]] had a full schedule
last Thursday. In the morning, he presided over his first hearing as
the chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and
Pensions, his old-school Brooklyn accent ringing out across the
hearing room. At lunchtime, he held a press conference with a group of
labor-union officials to demand paid sick leave for railway workers, a
cause he has long championed. Speaking from his office that afternoon,
he told me he was amped up about heading the health committee, a
position previously held by Senator Patty Murray, of Washington.

“I think the first thing we have to do is to talk to the American
people about what is going on in our economy, and that is something
Congress or the media does not do very often,” Sanders said. Then he
went into a familiar spiel, similar to the ones he delivered in 2016
and 2020, about how the American health-care system is
“dysfunctional and broken,” nearly twice as costly as the systems
in other industrialized countries, yet leaving eighty-five million
Americans uninsured or underinsured. “Meanwhile,” he went on,
“the insurance companies make tens of billions a year in profit.”
Sanders also castigated Big Pharma, noting that, earlier in the day,
he had spoken to someone from Finland, who had told him that drug
prices in that country were, in some cases, a tenth of the prices in
the United States. “So we have to pick on the incredible greed of
the pharmaceutical industry, who make huge profits every year and pay
their C.E.O.s huge salaries and compensation packages,” he said.
“That’s something we are going to go into big time.”

Chairing a Senate committee isn’t new to Sanders, who has been in
the Senate since 2007. In 2013 and 2014, he helmed the Veterans’
Affairs Committee, where he worked with the Republican John McCain
[[link removed]] to successfully reform
the health-care system for veterans. From 2021 to 2023, he was the
head of the Senate Budget Committee, where he helped to craft the
$1.9-trillion American Rescue Act, a bill he has described as the most
significant piece of legislation for working-class people since the
Great Depression
[[link removed]].
Subsequently, Sanders played a prominent role in the Democratic effort
to enact most of President Joe Biden
[[link removed]]’s Build Back Better agenda
in one huge spending bill, and lamented its demise
[[link removed]].
Chairing the health committee, it seems, has reënergized Sanders and
given him a new platform that he relishes, one from which he can
address many of the everyday economic issues that he has always felt
passionately about.

In January, he wrote to Moderna and rebuked the company for raising
the price of its _covid_
[[link removed]] vaccine. Last week, he
and other Democrats on the committee asked Howard Schultz, the C.E.O.
of Starbucks, to testify next month about his company’s efforts
to suppress union-organization efforts at its shops
[[link removed]].
“Starbucks has been cited dozens and dozens of times by the National
Labor Relations Board for breaking the law,” he told me. “They are
attempting to break the unions, and it happens to be illegal to do
that.” I asked when we should expect to see the top executives of
Amazon and other companies that have fought against unionization
campaigns
[[link removed]] following
Schultz up to the Hill. “We’ll see, we’ll take them one at a
time,” Sanders replied. “But right now we’ve got around to
Starbucks.”

As a politician, Sanders has three great strengths. First, he is
always on message. Second, the pathologies of twenty-first-century
American capitalism insure that message continues to resonate broadly.
Third, at the age of eighty-one, he still exudes energy and enthusiasm
for the task at hand. (“I just turned thirty-four, and he runs
circles around me every day,” Mike Casca, his communications
director, told me.) In 2020, Donald Trump
[[link removed]] caricatured Sanders’s
political philosophy as communism. Actually, it’s a lot closer to
Scandinavian social democracy, and it also contains a distinctly
American strain of moral outrage, which can be traced back to the
Wobblies and Eugene V. Debs
[[link removed]],
as well as to the Progressives and William Jennings Bryan. Later this
month, Penguin Random House is publishing a book, which Sanders and
the journalist John Nichols co-wrote, titled “It’s OK to be Angry
About Capitalism
[[link removed]].”
He’s going on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” to promote
the book, then flying to England for an event in Oxford.

Sanders is also planning to get members of the health committee out of
Washington and onto the road, at a series of public hearings that he
will hold around the country. “I am excited about that,” he told
me. “Look, one of the great political crises facing this country is
that many millions of working-class people no longer believe that
government is capable of responding to their needs.” He continued,
“We’re gonna hear from workers about what’s going on, the wages
they are earning. We are going to talk to senior citizens about the
high cost of prescription drugs, talk to young people about the
affordability of college and what student debt is doing to them.
We’ll talk to parents who can’t afford to send their kids to child
care.”

That seems to be a good idea, but will it help facilitate the passage
of legislation to tackle some of these problems? In the past, some of
Sanders’s own Democratic colleagues have questioned his record as a
legislator. The Republican Mitt Romney
[[link removed]], who sits on the Senate
health committee, recently dismissed Sanders’s style as “a lot of
storm and fury” and predicted that “very little will reach the
floor.” During our conversation, Sanders freely conceded that he
doesn’t have the votes to get through the Senate a Medicare for All
bill of the sort that he has long supported. But he insisted that he
could work with Republicans on such issues as expanding nonprofit
community health centers and reducing the cost of prescription drugs.

“The primary health-care system is even more broken than the general
health-care system,” he said. “You have tens and tens of millions
of people who, even if they have insurance, can’t find a doctor.
Hospitals are shutting down. We don’t have enough doctors. We
don’t have enough nurses. We don’t have enough dentists or
mental-health providers.” In 2010, Sanders and Jim Clyburn, the
Democratic congressman from South Carolina, championed a provision of
the Affordable Care Act
[[link removed]] that provided
eleven billion dollars to build and expand community health centers,
including in rural regions. Since then, the program has been expanded,
but it needs reauthorization later this year. Sanders wants to renew
and further expand it, with a long-term goal of securing basic health
coverage for all Americans. “Community health centers have a long
bipartisan history, and in many Republican areas it is very hard for
people to access the medical care they need,” he said. “I think
the Republicans understand it, so that is definitely an area where we
can get Republican support.”

Building on last year’s Inflation Reduction Act
[[link removed]]—which
included a landmark provision that empowered Medicare administrators
to negotiate a very limited number of prescription-drug prices—is
another Sanders goal. “Generally speaking, Republican voters are
older, and they are getting crucified by the cost of prescription
drugs,” he noted. Right after saying this, however, Sanders pointed
out that there are more than seventeen hundred registered lobbyists
in Washington
[[link removed]] for
pharmaceuticals and health products. When I asked if he could defeat
this highly paid army of corporate-privilege defenders, he replied,
“These guys are enormously powerful—so I am not predicting
victory, but I am saying that they will know they have been in a
fight.”

Sticking it to the corporate plutocracy may be what many of
Sanders’s admirers will remember him for (that, and Larry David’s
timeless impersonations of him during the 2016 campaign). But he’s
also hopeful that history will credit him with something more lasting:
shifting the terms of the political debate inside the Democratic
Party. “I take pride in the fact that we have, to a significant
degree, changed the conversation as to what is achievable in this
country,” he said. “I’m very proud of the fact that large
numbers of young people and working-class people are prepared to think
big and not small.” If, as is often said, Joe Biden occupies the
very center of the Party, Sanders surely helped to move that point
leftward. He didn’t do it alone, of course. But, in one example of
how things have changed, the Biden White House last year proposed an
annual wealth tax on billionaires
[[link removed]]—a
proposal that Sanders and Elizabeth Warren
[[link removed]] campaigned on in the
2020 Democratic primary, and which Biden called for again in
his State of the Union speech
[[link removed]].

When I suggested to Sanders, only partly in jest, that Biden had
sounded a bit like him, he replied, “I wouldn’t go that far, but I
thought it was one of the better State of the Union speeches I have
heard.” Since attacking each other during the 2020 primary, Sanders
and Biden have established a good working relationship. Sanders
appreciated Biden’s efforts to reach out to his supporters after he
won the nomination: he included some of them in a policymaking task
force that endorsed some progressive goals. A couple of weeks ago,
Sanders told me, he went down to the White House and chatted with the
President for an hour about his agenda for the health-and-labor
committee.

Despite this cordiality, there has inevitably been some speculation
about Sanders’s intentions for 2024, and whether he could possibly
launch a third Presidential bid. When I brought this up, Sanders had a
scripted answer. “Right now,” he said, “my assumption is that
President Biden is running for reëlection, and, if he is, I will be
supporting him.” Biden is expected to confirm his candidacy soon.
Meanwhile, Sanders is focussing on matters that he insists are more
important. On Monday, he joined Warren and other Democrats in both
houses of Congress to introduce legislation that would expand Social
Security benefits by twenty-four hundred dollars a year and fund it
for the next seventy-five years from higher payroll taxes on the rich.
Later in the day, he held a town-hall meeting in Washington about the
“teacher pay crisis in America.” On Thursday, he will preside over
a hearing on the shortage of doctors, nurses, and other health-care
workers. The senator from Vermont is as busy as he’s been since he
was first elected to the House as a forty-nine-year-old independent
socialist in 1990—and he seems to be revelling in it. “There is an
enormous amount of work to be done,” he told me. 

_John Cassidy
[[link removed]] has been a
staff writer at The New Yorker since 1995. He also writes a column
about politics, economics, and more
[[link removed]] for newyorker.com._

 

* Bernie Sanders
[[link removed]]
* senate hearings
[[link removed]]
* Big Pharma
[[link removed]]
* Starbucks
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]