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HARTMANN: It is Brunch with Bernie. Senator Sanders welcome to the program. A lot going on in the Senate?

SANDERS: We will introduce, or rather, re-introduce legislation to break up the largest banks in this country. Thom it is my view that we’re never going to see the middle class in this country expand, we’re never going to see poverty go down, unless we deal with this incredible power and wealth that resides on Wall Street.

So we’re going to introduce legislation that gives the Secretary of the Treasury the power to determine which banks are too big to fail. We think many of them are too big and we need to break them up. The reason that I want to do this is because you are looking at a situation where the six largest financial institutions in this country have assets of over nine trillion dollars. That’s two thirds of the GDP of our nation. They write half of the mortgages, they issue a heck of a lot of credit cards, and unless we begin to break them up I don’t think you are going to have the kind of competition that we need in the marketplace. I think that we’ve got to also address this phenomenon of Wall Street being a gambling casino rather than a conduit for money going into the productive economy. I worry about that nationally and I worry about the international financial system and what it is doing all over the world. But this issue of Wall Street has got to be dealt with.

As you may know, a couple of weeks ago Eric Holder the Attorney General, made a rather astounding remark in suggesting that he thought that if we went after some of the CEOs of the large Wall Street companies we could have a negative economic impact on this country and on the world because these companies are so big that if you destabilize the companies it could have a trickle down impact. So in other words, you have a situation where you have these guys who are not only too big to fail they are too big to jail.

HARTMANN: It is crazy.

SANDERS: It really is. And it just speaks to the power of Wall Street and that is an issue that we have to deal with. Second of all, a lot of the media lately has been discussing and focusing on a lot of important social issues: gay rights, DOMA, guns, immigration. All of these are very very important and I’m sympathetic to moving forward in all these areas. But in the midst of all of that I do not want to lose focus on what is happening in the economy. And while the economy makes some modest indications of improvement, i.e. the stock market is doing very very well, housing is doing very well, we have to never forget that the middle class of this country in many respects continues to disappear. Median family income has gone down by $5,000 since 1999. We’ve got to remember that real unemployment in this country is not 7.7% it is over 14% if you include in that number those people who have given up looking for work, those people who are working part time. We can not forget what is really really distressing is that as high as unemployment is in general it is much higher for young people. About 25% of our young people are unemployed and that includes many young people who are leaving college with heavy loans. They borrow, they go through college, they are unemployed or maybe they get jobs that do not require a college degree. About half of the new jobs that college graduates are getting do not really require a college degree and the pay is kind of low. And we have to remember also that when we talk about the economy that most of the new jobs being created in recent years are low paying jobs. Which speaks to the need to raise the minimum wage but also to create jobs in this country that pay people a livable wage. I’m on the budget committee and during the budget process we had an interesting debate. I introduced an amendment which got through the committee and is in the bill dealing with income inequality and the minimum wage. The point that I made was about the largest welfare recipient in this country. Do you know who the largest welfare recipient is in this country?

HARTMANN: No.

SANDERS: It’s Walmart.

HARTMANN: Oh yeah, of course. Because all their employees earn so little they qualify for food stamps and Medicare?

SANDERS: So here you have the Walmart family that is the wealthiest family in America that owns more wealth than the bottom 40% of the American people, and yet they get a huge subsidy from the Federal Government because many of their workers earn wages that are so low that these workers are eligible for Medicaid, they are eligible for food stamps, they are eligible for subsidized housing. That is all being picked up by the tax payers of this country to enable the Walton family to be the wealthiest family in America because they get away with paying wages of $8, $9, $10 an hour. That is an issue that has got to be addressed.

There is going to be a bill to raise the minimum wage and I am strongly supporting that effort. Also in the budget process I managed to get an amendment passed which has the Senate going on record in opposition to the so called chained CPI. This is an effort on the part of Republicans, the President and some Democrats, to re-calculate how cost of living adjustments are made for Seniors on Social Security and for disabled vets. This means significant cut backs in Social Security and benefits for disabled vets and that’s an issue that we are going to stay on.

I would also point out that in the budget process what we managed to do (and I worked hard on this as a member of the committee) is to get a hundred billion dollars into the budget to invest in our crumbling infrastructure. We need to do a lot more than that. We have trillions of dollars of unmet needs out there in terms of roads, in terms of bridges and water systems. And when we invest in our infrastructure we can create a significant number of jobs. Job creation is enormously important, investing in our infrastructure, transforming our energy system away from fossil fuel to energy efficiency and sustainable energy, protecting social security, Medicare, Medicaid. So these are some of the issues that some of us are dealing with in Congress right now.

HARTMANN: Mexico just passed a law. It was before their parliament or legislature to say that any company that owned more than 50% of the telecom or cable industry (this is directed to Carlos Slim who owns 70 plus percent of all the cell phone and cable TV business and is the richest guy in the world) could be broken up. You started out talking about the big banks. Is there any possibility we could see any kind of effort to bring back the Sherman Anti-Trust Act which Reagan basically suspended in 1982?

SANDERS: The answer is you have a Congress now that is incredibly conservative on financial issues. As I mentioned earlier, we are making some progress on gay rights, we are making some progress on getting more women involved in the political process, I think we are going to make some progress on immigration and guns, but when you come to the money issues, the financial issues, we are losing ground because of the power of big money. The point that I made earlier about banks can be made in many other industries where you have a handful of large corporations that control what goes on in that particular industry. I would use media as one case in point. Right now at the FCC, they have in front of them language or rule that would deregulate media even more. It would do away with forced ownership rules which would allow fewer companies to own more and more media in America. It is a very bad idea and something we will work on.

HARTMANN: Yeah, it’s so Rupert Murdoch can get the LA Times.

Listen to the interview with Thom Hartmann and Senator Bernie Sanders.

Thom’s Guest: Bernie Sanders, U.S. Senator from Vermont.

Take a look at Bernie Sanders’ website.

SONALI KOLHATKAR IS ON MATERNITY LEAVE.