Name: Sen. Bernie Sanders | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #524
Uploaded: 2024-08-13T21:02:07.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Sen. Bernie Sanders | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #524' from Theo Von on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-08-13. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Sen. Bernie Sanders | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #524' from Theo Von on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-08-13. Transcript available.

Sen. Bernie Sanders | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #524

I have some new tour dates I want to tell you about. We will be in Lafayette,
Louisiana,
Thanksgiving weekend on November 29 at the Cajun Dome, baby, down there in Poirier
Country.
And we will also be in Balmont, Texas on November 30 at Doggett Ford Park Arena.
Get your tickets early starting Tuesday, August 13th at 10 a.m. local time with
pre-sale code
Rat King. General on sale begins Wednesday, August 14th at 10 a.m. local time.
We will also be in Las Vegas, Nevada at the LSU USC opening weekend of football,
August 30th
and 31st. Bend, Oregon, Spokane, Washington, Portland, Oregon, Vancouver, B.C.
in the Canada.
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, North Little Rock, Springfield, Missouri, Kansas City,
Missouri,
Sioux Falls, South Dakota, La Crosse, Wisconsin, Green Bay, Wisconsin, and Moline,
Illinois.
You can get all your tickets at TheoVaughn.com slash T-O-U-R.
And thank you so much for supporting live comedy and our show.
Today's episode was filmed at the Venetian Soda and Cocktail Lounge in Burlington,
Vermont.
And we want to thank them for hosting us and allowing us in their beautiful
space.
And our guest, he's a United States Senator from Vermont.
He's an independent, though he's been friendly with the Democratic Party over
the years.
He's been a congressman, a senator, a presidential candidate, and he's one of
the biggest lightning rods in American politics.
At the very end of the interview, we did experience some difficulties with our
microphones,
so we apologize for the change in sound there.
We're grateful to welcome today's guest, Senator Bernie Sanders.
I love you.
So do you travel the country doing these things?
Yeah, mostly I travel doing a stand-up comedy, but about six years ago I
started doing podcasting
just in my kitchen at home.
And mostly was just talking about, like, I've been in recovery for years,
so mostly just talking about that kind of stuff.
Alcohol or?
Yeah, alcohol and drugs and intimacy disorders, so a lot of that kind of stuff.
And then we started having guests after about two years and went on Joe Rogan a
few times,
and that helped boost the steam, you know?
And, yeah, it's been surprising since then, you know?
Congratulations.
Thanks.
It's made me grow up some, which is a blessing and a curse, you know?
But, yeah, and I just went to the Grateful Dead the other day with my brother,
so pretty cool.
You ever see the Grateful Dead?
Uh, no.
You remember?
What was the first concert you ever went to?
A name you probably wouldn't know.
You ever hear of Pete Seeger?
I've heard of Bob Seeger.
Yeah, I think that there's some of the related.
I was kind of into folk music more into that.
Billy Strings, have you ever heard of him?
Yep.
Yeah.
He's awesome.
He's one of my favorites.
Pete Seeger, that's him right there.
That's good.
That was fast.
Yeah, he's an interesting guy.
He, um, and there's another guy who died a long time ago.
I don't know if you know his name.
Woody Guthrie.
Is that the name of him?
Woody Guthrie.
I've heard of him, yeah.
Yeah.
And actually, his granddaughter helped me out during my campaigns.
Um, he was, he wrote a lot during the Great Depression.
So he went around the hobo camps, talked to poor people, you know?
Oh, wow.
And he wrote songs.
You ever hear the song, This Land Is Your Land Is?
That's his song.
Oh, wow.
I didn't even think somebody wrote that.
No, he is, uh, he was a great songwriter and a great singer.
Woody Guthrie.
Woody Guthrie.
I'm going to have to tap into some of his stuff.
Yeah, my brother and I went, um, you have a brother?
You have a brother?
I have an older brother, yeah.
Yeah.
You guys ever go to a concert together?
Nope.
I don't think we are.
He lives in Oxford, England.
Yeah.
It's fancy over there.
It is.
Well, but there's, have you ever been to England?
Yeah.
And they have this old university called Oxford University, which is one of the
great universities in the world.
Yeah.
You got, I stayed in a house, God, like it was 1400 to 1300, who the hell knows?
I mean, really, it goes way, way back.
Oh, yeah.
The plum, yeah.
You got to bring your own plumment, I'm sure.
Well, they've advanced a little bit, but.
Uh, Bernie Sanders, thank you so much for joining us today.
Great to be with you, Theo.
I really appreciate it.
Um, whenever you started in politics, I'm sure that there was like a real idea
of like a one person.
Can really affect change, right?
Um, do you think that that's still possible today with, uh, like a lot of the
lobbies and stuff that they have that goes on?
Well, I think, you know, one of the points that I think everybody knows is you
have a government dominated by big money interests, right?
That's no great secret.
Uh, so you have these billionaires now and they're super PACs.
If you're a billionaire, you can contribute hundreds of millions of dollars to
elect people, to feed people.
If you're a large corporation or you represent the pharmaceutical industry, do
you know how many lobbyists there are in Washington, D.C. representing the big
drug companies?
Take a wild and crazy guess.
Um, 2,000.
You got it.
That's a pretty good guess.
About 1,800.
Wow.
So there are a hundred members of the Senate and 435 members of the House.
Got it?
535.
And you got 1,800 lobbyists.
Well-paid former leaders of the Democratic Party, leaders of the Republican
Party.
They're there to say, hey, Congress, do everything you can to make sure we make
as much money as possible.
And who gives a damn whether people can afford the prescription drugs they need?
So that's power.
So you have a whole other drug government almost going on.
Absolutely.
That's even bigger than our own government.
Numbers-wise.
Well, not big.
That's about what we can define what we mean by bigger.
That's fair.
But if you look at Wall Street, the power of Wall Street, the drug companies,
the insurance companies, the fossil fuel industry, you have enormous wealth,
enormous power.
And if your question is, is it government that tells them what to do or they
tell what the government to do, more the latter.
They tell the government what to do.
Very powerful.
Does it feel like that's changed over your time in politics or has it always
been that way?
I think to some degree, you know, money talks, right?
Yeah.
No great secret.
That's always been the case.
It's worse now, and I'll tell you why.
As a result of this Citizens United Supreme Court decision, you familiar with
that?
So people brought action.
Billionaires really brought action.
They said, hey, it's undemocratic.
You're taking away my freedom of speech, right?
I have a First Amendment, right?
We're on TV now.
You could say whatever you want to say, and I'm a billionaire, and I want to
spend unlimited sums of money to defeat this candidate or support this
candidate.
And you have laws on the books now which restrict my freedom to buy the
election.
You understand what I'm saying?
A hundred percent.
Okay.
And the Supreme Court said, well, guys, you're right.
You're billionaires.
You should be able to spend as much money as you want to buy elections, and
that's what you have.
So right now, this is literally the truth.
You have super PACs where billionaires can put unlimited amounts of money,
hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars to defeat people they don't like
or to support people they do like.
That's power.
And that is a corruption of what democracy is supposed to be.
Look, you and I can disagree on an issue, right?
Ten people.
We argue it out.
We vote.
I get the majority.
You get the majority.
Somebody wins.
Somebody loses.
I don't think billionaires should be able to buy elections.
And I think most people think that.
Most people are like, why are corporations or companies allowed to give money
to candidates and influence elections, right?
Almost every person I know says that that should be no.
Whose responsibility is it to make sure it doesn't happen?
Is it ours or is it the politicians?
Well, what happened is there were laws put in place, not as strong as I would
like, which did limit the power of big money.
Yeah.
And what that Supreme Court decision said is what Congress did was unconstitutional,
denied big money, their freedom of speech.
If you're a billionaire, you have freedom of speech.
That means you can run ads all over the day and, you know, beat Bernie Sanders,
beat anybody.
And that's what happened.
So what we have got to do now is once again pass legislation that will do that.
Are there politicians that aren't viable, kind of?
Or aren't influenced by lobbyists?
Of course they aren't.
There are.
There are.
Yeah.
There are some very good people.
But many people, look, just throw out an example.
You're running for election, okay?
Your opponent is spending millions of dollars.
These TV ads are up there, all right?
You think you're going to stand up to powerful special interests who say, you
know, Theo, listen, I like you, but you're going to take that position on that
issue.
I've got to be running millions of dollars of ads against you.
What do you think you're going to do if you want to get elected?
You could say, well, go to hell.
I'm going to do it anyhow.
And many would do.
Or you run the risk of, you know, seeing that kind of money come against you.
Or you then have to find a lobbyist that has an interest of yours and you have
to try and fight back.
Which is a pretty pathetic thing, right?
Right.
So, to some degree, what you have right now, it's a funny kind of thing.
It's, let's say you were running against me.
It's not you against me.
It's your moneyed interest versus my moneyed interest.
That's what super PACs are.
Yeah.
Now, corporations cannot directly contribute to your campaign, but they, big
money interests,
billionaires can contribute to a super PAC.
So you have all these, if what I would say to you, people watch the show here,
look at
the ads that are on television.
They'll be underneath it.
You'll see paid for by supporters of an American way of life or whatever the
hell it is.
Understand that in most cases, these are billionaires putting money into a
candidate.
So the super PAC is kind of the loophole.
Yep.
Is how they do it.
So it's not directly from them.
Exactly.
There are limits.
All right.
You wanted to contribute to my campaign.
They're pretty stringent limits.
You can't contribute.
I think it's, I don't know, it's 5,000 bucks.
Through a super PAC, you can contribute a hundred million dollars.
Wow.
That's a big issue.
We don't talk about it enough.
And then you can understand that if you're an ordinary person,
who's going to listen to your interests, your needs, right?
When billionaires are putting in this kind of money.
Right.
If the best I can help you out with is 5,000 bucks, you might show up and shake
my hand.
But when something really, when the rickshaw hits the road or whatever, you're
going to
be working for the big dogs for the cash.
You got it.
And that's the way the system works.
And how do we change that?
Well, first of all, this campaign finance reform is a big deal.
Just this one issue.
And I'm glad you raised it.
We've got to do away for citizens.
We have to have restrictions.
Okay.
When I ran for president, the average contribution was $27.
Okay.
Roughly speaking.
And we've got millions of people to contribute.
So I think there has to be a real stringent limit on the amount of money that
any individual
can put into the political process.
And I also believe that we should move to what we call public funding of
elections.
You're a candidate.
You want to run for governor.
You want to run for senator.
If you show that you have a certain amount of support, you got X number of
thousands of
people willing to put $5 into your campaign, you can be able to get public
funding.
And there's a limit on how much you can spend.
These are not radical ideas.
They exist in many countries around the world, actually.
Yeah, it's pretty normal.
Do you think that our election process is still democratic?
Do you think it's still-
Yes and no.
I mean, you know, you want to 