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SARAH FERGUSON: Tell me, how you did America, the land of the free, become the land of crushing inequality?
They are looking at what Democrats have done for years and not much has happened to improve their lives.
Demand that the wealthy start paying their fair share of taxes, making sure that young people go to college without leaving school deeply in debt. It is absolutely true that we've always had inequality in America, but you've not had a situation where three people own more wealth than the bottom half of American society.
Add all of that together, the power is with the rich, with the 1 per cent. Working families are struggling. SARAH FERGUSON: Are you surprised that Donald Trump's appeal to those blue-collar Democrats that you were just talking about has survived into a second run? BERNIE SANDERS: Everything is at stake. I mean, right now, not only in our country, but in Europe, around the world, Latin America, there are struggles about whether or not nations will remain democratic or move toward oligarchy, move towards autocracy and certainly if the United States moves in an authoritarian way it will certainly send a signal to every country on Earth that that's the future of politics in this world.
SARAH FERGUSON: You blame corporate media for supporting the inequality in the United States singling out Rupert Murdoch in particular. Now Murdoch has always argued that his newspaper and television gives the common person what they want and that to argue otherwise is elitist. BERNIE SANDERS: No, I think, I don't want to speculate about the what-ifs, or what should have happened. Biden is the candidate, and our job is to bring various coalitions, people have concerns about Biden, but to make it very clear that a) Biden has done some good things and I don't think he has fully gotten the credit for some of the things he has done.
BERNIE SANDERS: Well, that's a good question and I will tell you we are doing our best to make sure that they will be influential. He is going to raise wages, the minimum wage in this country to a living wage. Are we going to build the housing that we need to build? SARAH FERGUSON: Given they've had four years to consolidate their power, how open are they to your involvement?
I worked as chairman of budget committee in the Senate with him on what we called the American Rescue Plan which was a $1.9 trillion bill that really went a long way to help us get our economy back on track as a result of COVID and also moved us forward on public health. It is not unusual now for people openly gay to have positions of power but I think we still have a long way to go to bring young people into the political process although even in that regard, I would say that in the House of Representatives, there are dozens and dozens of really strong progressive young people, you know, people under 40 who are doing a great job and I think sometimes we don't pay as much attention to that reality as we should.
SARAH FERGUSON: This is a strange position for you to be in, isn't it, because the left in the US wants a permanent ceasefire and you don't. That puts you to the right of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Have you found this difficult to navigate?