A Timeline of Bernie Sanders Foreshadowing the Future American Trashfire Like He’s Fucking Doc Brown or Some Shit
January 17, 1991
“I believe in the long run the action unleashed last night will go strongly against our interests in the Middle East. Clearly, the United States and its allies will win this war [the Persian Gulf War], but the death and destruction caused, in my opinion, will not soon be forgotten by the third world in general and the poor people of the Middle East in particular. I fear very much that what we said yesterday is that war and the enormous destructive power of our armed forces is our preferred manner for dealing with the very complicated and terrible crisis in the Middle East. I fear that someday we will regret that decision and that we are in fact laying the groundwork for more and more wars in that reason in years to come.”
October 1, 1998
“Alan Greenspan, the Fed chairman, testified to Congress that bankers knew exactly what they were doing and the policing of hedge funds and their attendant risk. On September 16, he assured Representative Richard Baker that risk in hedge fund lending was well under control…We hear a lot about crony capitalism in Russia. Crony capitalism in South Korea and Indonesia. Chairman Greenspan, I hope in your testimony today that you will talk about Crony capitalism in America. About one man’s investment threatening the entire economic stability of the globe. What we have here are banks that are willing to lend billions of dollars to one man so that he can gamble on whether interest rates go up by a half percent or goes down by a half percent…”
February 17, 2000
SANDERS: As you know, and I think agree with, the United States has the most unfair distribution of wealth and income in the industrialized world with the richest 1% owning 40% of our wealth — more than the bottom 95%. Meanwhile, 20% of our children live in poverty. We have millions of people who are experiencing hunger. We have some homelessness. People can’t afford health insurance. Can’t afford to send their kids to college. Can you briefly tell us what policies you would recommend to Congress to do away with or ease this disparity of wealth that we are currently experiencing.
GREENSPAN: Let me start, Congressman, by saying what I would not suggest. And what I would not suggest is means which would somehow obliterate the wealth of those who are in the upper income groups, or upper-asset groups because there’s no evidence to suggest at all that if you were to take the top 20, 50, 100, 500 people and essentially eliminate all the wealth they had, that would improve the standard of living of anybody — so merely obliterating wealth or merely confiscating wealth strikes me as wholly inappropriate policy if the purpose is to achieve higher standard —
SANDERS: But I don’t think anyone is talking about obliterating or confiscating wealth. We’re talking about fairness and the appropriateness of one person having 80 billion dollars in personal wealth while children go hungry.
October 2, 2002
“Mr. Speaker, let me give you five reasons why I’m opposed to giving the President a blank check to launch a unilateral invasion and occupation of Iraq and why I will oppose this resolution.”
March 3, 2009
“Do you have to be a large, greedy, reckless financial institution to apply for a [bailout]?”
May 18, 2014
“As a result of [Citizen’s United], they said that corporations are people. And that individuals could spend an unlimited sum of money in elections…Why are they spending so much money in politics? Why are they supporting candidates throughout this country, running for the House, running for the Senate, clearly they’ll be involved in the next Presidential election — what do they stand for? And that’s the issue. And it disturbs me very much that the media hasn’t been talking about that issue.”
