At a meeting of the Natural Resources Committee’s subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources earlier in the week, AOC batted back GOP/fossil fuel industry assertions that they need more permits and leases. “The problem is not a shortage of leases or land, the problem is a fossil fuel industry that is more interested in keeping supply artificially low so that prices stay artificially high. I believe there is almost no greater illustration of this point than the profiteering and artificial surge in gas prices that we all experienced last year. The truth is that these companies are not necessarily primarily motivated by energy independence; they’re corporations, primarily interested in profit.”
She then noted that the Transparency and Production of American Energy Act (TAP) is a “fossil fuel industry wishlist” and that the proposed Permitting for Mining Needs (PERMIT-MN) Act. “would loosen our mining regulations for the most toxic industry in America.”
Sounds like the kind of thing Bernie would say? You bet! And now, as chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), he’s in position to, as Liza Featherstone put it for Jacobin readers, “provide some powerful public education on our capitalist system and lend fuel to organizing efforts nationwide,” even for the folks who didn’t read his new book, It’s OK To Be Angry About Capitalism. From that book: “When we talk about uber-capitalism in its rawest form– about greed that knows no limit, about corporations that viciously oppose the right of workers to organize, about the abuses of wealth and power that tear apart our society– we’re talking about Amazon. And when we’re talking about Amazon, we’re talking about Jeff Bezos.” Yeah… so who’s afraid of the big bad billionaire. No one who graduated from Brooklyn’s PS 197 and James Madison High back in the day. Bernie has invited Bezos, a notorious union-buster, to testify.
As head of the Senate HELP Committee, he plans “to call CEOs to testify before Congress, and he plans to use that power. Featherstone: “He’s already demanded that Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, appear. Schultz has refused and is sending a lower-level flunky. Makes sense: he’s on his way out and presumably doesn’t want to be remembered as the guy who was humiliated by Bernie Sanders in a viral YouTube clip. Sanders called Schultz’s refusal to appear before Congress ‘disappointing but not surprising.’ There would be great symbolic value to Bernie Sanders roasting a corporate villain as iconic as Schultz. However, Sanders is going to have pointed questions for any Starbucks executive sent in his place. In January, he wrote Schultz a letter expressing ‘serious concerns’ about the company’s ‘concerted and relentless’ campaign against its workers’ efforts to unionize. Noting that employees had brought five hundred unfair labor practice cases against Starbucks, Sanders noted that workers have a legal right to organize and that, ‘unfortunately and unacceptably, Starbucks has shown a flagrant disregard for those freedoms… Therefore I urge you to immediately halt your aggressive and illegal union busting campaign… and negotiate a contract with the workers that is fair and just.’”
Bernie has another, potentially even more popular political intervention up his sleeve: exposing the vaccine profiteers. Sanders has invited Stéphane Bancel, CEO of Moderna, before Congress. Bancel, Sanders has noted, developed the vaccine with government money, became a billionaire, and is now quadrupling the price of this product that remains vital to public health. Sanders told the New York Times, “I think Mr. Bancel should be talking with his advisers about what he might say to the United States Senate.” Moderna is a major player in a recent Senate report on “Pharma Pandemic Profiteers.” Bancel has accepted Bernie’s invitation and will appear before Congress on March 22 at 10 a.m. (EST).
Sanders’s invitations are already yielding some results. Moderna said that it will make sure the vaccine is provided free to uninsured and underinsured Americans. That announcement came the same day that Sanders invited Bancel to testify in what Sanders dubbed, with deadpan sarcasm in an interview with Meet the Press, “a wild and crazy coincidence.”
These hearings are a savvy political move on Sanders’s part. Tackling the high price of lifesaving drugs, for example, is not only a crowd-pleaser; it’s a bipartisan issue that even some Republicans have signaled an interest in working with Sanders to address. Sanders has pointed out that, even in polling conducted by Republicans, voters rank drug prices as a top issue. Recently, after Sanders learned that Bancel had accepted his invitation, he said on the Senate floor that, while there’s a lot of discussion about how “divided” the nation is,
one of the most important matters facing our country the American people— Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Progressives, and Conservatives— could not be more united. And that is the need to take on the unprecedented corporate greed of the pharmaceutical industry and to substantially lower the outrageously high price of prescription drugs.
In his remarks, Sanders noted that no one knows for sure how many Americans die because they can’t afford the medicine they need, but that a 2020 study estimated that over a hundred thousand Medicare recipients die each year for this reason.
It’s going to be difficult to get much legislation passed with a Republican majority in the House, and, around the country, Republicans are intent on starting boorishly stupid and cruel culture wars. But as he has throughout his career, Sanders is determined to cut through this fog. Other left elected officials should take notes from his approach: by keeping a spotlight on the capitalists most responsible for inequality and exploitation in this country, he will steer the national political climate in a more productive direction.
