Courtesy of Pam Martens
Presidential Candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders, Delivers a Major Policy Speech on Reforming Wall Street on January 5, 2016
Presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont gave a speech yesterday that is destined to go down in the history books of this era, further enshrining him as one of the most courageous voices of our time. Sanders promised to break up the serially criminally-inclined banks on Wall Street and reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act to drive a permanent stake through the heart of too-big-to-fail. But if you watched either his official campaign’s YouTube video of his speech or the one provided by volunteers for his campaign, three key passages of what he said have gone missing from the video. We were able to reconstruct the full speech as delivered by transcribing the three missing sections from a YouTube video posted by the PBS Newshour which, notably, had no gaps in its video. (Watch the PBS video of the speech at the end of this article.)
Perhaps it’s simply attributable to a glitch. On the other hand, if you are familiar with the dirty tricks used by the American Liberty League to undermine proposed reforms by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a similar era of unprecedented corruption and one percent control, or conversant with how the Kochtopus is attempting to rewrite The Big Short movie, you might well harbor suspicions of skulduggery.
The first missing chunk of video comes early in Sanders speech as he explains what a real banking system is supposed to do. The portion that appears in orange below is missing from the official video:
Sanders: “We need a banking system that is part of the productive economy – making loans at affordable rates to small and medium-sized businesses so that we can create decent-paying jobs in our country. Wall Street cannot continue to be an island unto itself, gambling trillions in risky financial instruments, making huge profits and assured that, if their schemes fail, the taxpayers will be there to bail them out.”
What could possibly be so threatening in describing Wall Street as “an island unto itself, gambling trillions…” that someone would censor it from a speech? Well, Wall Street is located in Manhattan – an island. And while Manhattan is often referred to as the economic and cultural center of America, it’s also where the vast majority of financial crime is originating and which has, not coincidentally, “more billionaires than any other city in the world,” a total of 78 according to Forbes. Many of these billionaires have fleeced shareholders, or the banks’ depositors, or investors to achieve that one-percent status.
Sanders is not just anybody making these charges. He is currently one of the most popular members of Congress and is drawing tens of thousands of potential voters to rallies across America while competing head on with the Wall Street money spigot by raising campaign donations from average folks by tapping into the simmering anger against our rigged wealth transfer system run by Wall Street and backstopped by its crony regulator, the New York Fed – all physically located on the island of Manhattan.
The next section that went missing goes like this (the orange text was missing from the video):
Sanders: “In 2008, the taxpayers of this country bailed out Wall Street because we were told that they were ‘too big to fail.’ Yet, today, today, three out of the four largest financial institutions — JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo — are nearly 80 percent bigger than before we bailed them out because they were too-big-to-fail. Incredibly, the six largest banks in this country issue more than two-thirds of all credit cards and more than 35 percent of all mortgages. They control more than 95 percent of all financial derivatives and hold more than 40 percent of all bank deposits. Their assets today are equivalent to nearly 60 percent of the GDP of the United States of America. Enough is enough.
“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. This is true not just from a risk perspective and the fear of another bailout. It is also true from the reality that a handful of huge financial institutions simply have too much economic and political power over this country.”
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