The Week in Review
With Wall Street driving up oil and gas prices to near record highs, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday urged President Obama to ask for the resignation of federal regulators who won't enforce a new law to stop excessive speculation in oil markets. On Wednesday, Sanders welcomed an announcement that the Senate would vote on a House-passed budget that would decimate Medicare and Medicaid and give $1 trillion in new tax breaks to the wealthy. To tame growing deficits, an overwhelming majority of Americans favor higher taxes on households with incomes of $250,000 or more.
Gas
Gasoline pump prices for regular unleaded in Vermont averaged $3.91 a gallon on Friday morning. That's an increase of 30.2 cents in the last month, according to AAA's Daily Fuel Gauge Report. Big oil companies, meanwhile, posted record profits this week. "The skyrocketing cost of gasoline is causing severe economic pain to millions of Americans who have already suffered through the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression," Sanders said in a letter to Obama. With that backdrop, Sanders asked the president to intercede with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal regulatory body that has failed to rein in the rampant speculation artificially driving up oil prices.
Read more about excessive speculation in oil markets »
Budget
Senate Leader Harry Reid announced Wednesday that the Senate will vote on a House-passed budget for 2012. With Congress on recess, Republican congressmen faced days of tough questions from constituents at town meetings about the proposal that Sanders called "the most radical, right-wing extremist budget ever passed in the history of the United States Congress." In Vermont, Sanders hosted his own town meetings that focused on how the proposed federal budget would affect families and children. "While we have to move toward a balanced budget, we have to do it in a responsible way," Sanders told 100 people at a high school cafeteria in Morristown. "We need shared sacrifice, not just cuts that balance the budget on the backs of the sick, children, the poor and the elderly." In national polls, overwhelming majorities favor taxing families with incomes over $250,000 a year. In our own poll of visitors to this website, the result was even more lopsided.
Take the poll »
Watch the senator on Rachel Maddow »
Read more in the Stowe Reporter »
Big Bank Bailout
During
the financial crisis, big banks took near zero-interest funds from the Federal
Reserve and then loaned money back to the federal government at rates up to 12
times greater than the Fed's rock bottom interest charges, according to a Congressional Research Service analysis conducted
for Sanders. The central bank claimed at the time that the emergency loans were
needed so banks could provide credit to small- and medium-sized businesses that
desperately needed money to create jobs or to prevent layoffs.
"Instead of using this money to reinvest in the productive economy,
however, it appears that JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Bank of America used a
large portion of these near-zero-interest loans to buy U.S. government
securities and earn a higher interest rate at the same time, providing free
money to some of the largest financial institutions in this country,"
Sanders said. On The Big Picture, television host Thom Hartmann called it "one of the
biggest scams in the history of our nation."
