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"Unfortunately, instead of working with Congress on this real issue, Trump and Musk have launched an immoral and unconstitutional attack on the Department of Health and Human Services."
Responding to a new study showing that leading health services companies made $2.7 trillion in profits and spent $2.6 trillion on stock buybacks and dividends in the years 2001-22, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday vowed to continue "to take on the unprecedented level of corporate greed in our healthcare system."
The study, published this week by the Journal of the American Medical Association, noted the "growing concern that a large proportion of U.S. healthcare spending appears to be directed to corporate shareholders rather than enhancing affordable access, improving quality of care, or advancing research and development."
Sanders (I-Vt.)—the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions—said in a statement that "it is absolutely unacceptable that since 2001, the top healthcare companies in America spent 95% of their profits, $2.6 trillion, not to make Americans healthy, but to make their CEOs and stockholders obscenely rich."
The top health care companies in America spent 95% of their profits to make their CEOs & stockholders obscenely rich. How many Americans would be alive today if those companies spent $2.6 trillion on disease prevention and primary care, instead of stock buybacks and dividends?
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— Senator Bernie Sanders (@sanders.senate.gov) February 12, 2025 at 11:21 AM
"The function of a rational healthcare system is to guarantee quality healthcare to all, not huge payouts for stockholders and executives in the drug and insurance industries," Sanders asserted. "None of this money was used to search for new treatments and cures, to lower prices, or to improve patient care. That has got to change."
The senator continued:
This study confirms that the greatest waste, fraud, and abuse in this country is corporate greed. Unfortunately, instead of working with Congress on this real issue, [U.S. President Donald] Trump and [Department of Government Efficiency leader Elon] Musk have launched an immoral and unconstitutional attack on the Department of Health and Human Services.
Instead of taking on the greed of the pharmaceutical industry, Trump and Musk are taking away AIDS treatment from poor people.
Instead of taking on the for-profit insurance industry, Trump and Musk are making it harder for working-class Americans to get the healthcare they need through Medicaid and community health centers.
"This absurdity must end," Sanders stressed. "As the ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, I will do everything I can to take on the unprecedented level of corporate greed in our healthcare system."
Last month, Sanders—who twice sought the Democratic presidential nomination on a platform centering Medicare for All—unveiled a nine-point "Make America Healthy Again" plan in response to Health and Human Services secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s variation on Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan.
Every elected Democrat should be demanding that no taxpayer dollars go to corporations that lay off taxpayers involuntarily. If they don't, what good are they?
As the Trump-Musk administration takes an axe to the federal government’s budget and personnel, the Democrats have an opening to raise an issue that Musk will hate but Trump can’t ignore—private sector mass layoffs.
Right now, as Acting President Musk goes after agency after agency in the name of cost cutting, the Democrats are focused on public sector job cuts. As they should, tens of thousands of jobs are at risk.
But those numbers pale in comparison to the 1.8 million private sector workers who lost their jobs in December of 2024 due to involuntary layoffs. For the past several decades, more than 20 million jobs per year have been taken away from workers who did nothing wrong.
It won’t be easy to convince private sector workers that cutting federal government costs is a mistake. If you’re living paycheck to paycheck, you don’t want your tax dollars squandered, and USAID., to many, sounds like a money pit.
If the Democrats act forcefully to defend working-class jobs, they should have better chance to win back Congress from Trump in 2026.
But private sector workers do care about their own job insecurity, and Donald Trump knows it. He has spoken forcefully about keeping worker jobs from migrating to Mexico and elsewhere, and he could take actual action to make that happen with one simple Executive Order:
Corporations that receive taxpayer money via federal contracts and tax subsidies shall not lay off taxpayers involuntarily.
More than $750 billion in contracts for materials and services are made each year by the federal government. Many of the corporate recipients have had no qualms about laying off workers and using the savings to enrich their investors via stock buybacks, and there have been no effective rules to prevent this. (A stock buyback is when a corporation repurchases its own shares, thereby raising the price of the stock without improving the company in any material way.)
Taxpayers know there is a great deal of waste built into federal contracts, especially those massive purchases involving defense and advanced technologies.
It turns out that Musk’s companies, reportedly, have received $20 billion in federal contracts, with $15.4 billion coming to Tesla and Space X in the last decade. Last year, Tesla laid off more than 14,000 workers, and Space X has announced that this year it will lay off more than 10 percent of its workforce, about 6,000 jobs. Imagine if Musk were not allowed to stuff himself with taxpayer money unless he refrained from involuntary layoffs?
To get there the Democrats, for the first time in memory, would need to care about greed-driven private sector layoffs.
That will be difficult because the Democrats are more in tune with highly educated, upper middle-class federal workers. These are the kind of voters who have been trending Democratic while the party has shed the working class. And the Democrats see the federal agencies in which these voters work as part of their legacy, often created and enhanced by legislation they spear-headed. Federal workers are their people, doing the work that the Democrats care most about.
Not so much the private sector, where voters have been drifting away from the Democrats in large numbers for decades, especially in the swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. As I show in Wall Street’s War on Workers, since 1992, as a county’s mass layoff rate has gone up, the Democratic vote has gone down, even as these voters have grown more liberal on social issues.
The Democrats have been losing these working-class voters because they have failed to interfere in private sector layoff decisions, even when job destruction became a campaign issue.
For example, in the run up to the 2024 election, John Deere and Company announced they were shipping more than 1,000 jobs to Mexico while recording $10 billion in profits and conducting $12.2 billion in stock buybacks. Trump immediately called for a 200-percent tariff on all Deere imported goods if they didn’t rescind their layoffs.
The Democrats didn’t say a word about how to stop this needless job destruction and instead attacked the tariffs. Deere’s stock buybacks and profits proved the company had more than enough money to offer voluntary buyout packages for all their workers, not just the executives. But the Democrats did not speak up.
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Democrats also remained silent when the Mylan Pharmaceutical plant in Morgantown, WV, moved to India. Workers there begged the Democrats to use the Defense Production Act to keep open the facility, which made generic drugs. If Biden could do it for baby formula, why not for badly needed pharmaceuticals?
But not one Democrat came out in support of these workers, and 1,500 jobs with an average wage of $70,000 per year were tossed away.
Clearly, the Democrats have been pulling away from the working class. Why help these workers, some are saying, when they’re more than likely to vote for Republicans? And why challenge corporate power when you’re trying to win over highly educated executives and financial leaders?
Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who is up and arms these days about the attacks on federal workers, was very honest about this switch in 2016. I’ve quoted him again and again because he tells us precisely what the Democratic strategy has been all about:
"For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio & Illinois & Wisconsin."
At the launch of a second Trump presidency, Schumer’s political acumen has not aged well.
Nor has Ken Martin’s, the new chair of the Democratic National Committee, who has made it clear that billionaires are welcome.
“There are a lot of good billionaires out there that have been with Democrats, who share our values, and we will take their money, but we’re not taking money from those bad billionaires,” Martin said recently.
It is doubtful that Martin ever gave one second’s thought to the fact that most, if not all, of these “good” billionaires that “share our values” have grown wealthy from, to some significant extent, stock buybacks funded through mass layoffs.
The country needs the Democrats to go from defense to offense. If the only activity is mounting a resistance movement to Trump, the odds are slim that enough new voters will be gained to win back the House or the Senate in 2026.
Every elected Democrat should be demanding that no taxpayer dollars go to corporations that lay off taxpayers involuntarily. They should put that message on social media, old media, even billboards all over the swing states. They should challenge every Republican candidate to take a stand on it. It doesn’t cost the taxpayer one dime, but it can protect the livelihoods of millions of working people every year. Or, at least, give them leverage while working out their severance.
Every day Democrats should be asking Trump to sign the order. Does he really want to be seen giving our tax dollars to corporations that lay off taxpayers and funnel the savings to the rich?
And wouldn’t it be good for our weary souls to see Musk squirm because he wouldn’t be able to sup at the federal trough while casually laying off his employees?
You have to wonder if the Democrats are capable of such a move, or anything remotely close to it. Only if they truly are willing to take on Wall Street and the billionaire class. They need to believe, not just mouth the words, that they will fight the wealthy to protect the livelihoods of working people.
If the Democrats act forcefully to defend working-class jobs, they should have better chance to win back Congress from Trump in 2026. But in the short term, pushing Trump to defend his populist flank might help put a wedge between Trump and his billionaire bros, and get some relief for workers from financialized layoffs.
But don’t hold your breath. All those “good” Democratic billionaires might get upset.
From LA’s wildfires to Asheville’s floods, disasters are intensifying and demand resilience. Public banking offers a blueprint for recovery: leverage public dollars to cut long-term costs, create jobs, and rebuild smarter.
On the night of January 7th, as the Palisades Fire surged to 2,000 acres to the west and the Eaton Fire exploded to 1,000 to the east, I joined thousands fleeing hurricane-force winds that hurled embers for miles. But while I evacuated out of precaution, across Los Angeles, many Angelenos were not as fortunate. Like so many here, I spent those first sleepless nights glued to wall-to-wall news coverage, tracking the fires’ paths. But while flames dominated headlines, a slower crisis burns, one that Los Angeles has yet to confront.
Caught in a cycle of destruction and recovery that grows more urgent every year, fire season is no longer a season—it’s a year-round threat. Entire neighborhoods in Altadena have lost more than homes—they’ve watched their generational wealth turn to rubble. In Pacific Palisades, emergency teams scrambled to stabilize hillsides before landslides erased what remained. With wildfire losses now climbing past $250 billion, one question echoes through the city: Who pays to rebuild? And how can we do it faster, smarter, without sinking deeper into debt?
Los Angeles isn’t the first to face this reckoning. Back in 1997, Grand Forks, North Dakota, suffered a catastrophic flood. Their city was left in ruins, but they had something most cities don’t: the Bank of North Dakota (BND), America’s only state-owned public bank. Within two weeks, the BND funneled around $70 million in credit for emergency operations and rebuilding. While FEMA took months to distribute aid, the BND’s local presence and public mandate allowed it to act with precision. ND mortgage holders got six-month payment pauses. Show me one Wall Street bank that’s offered that kind of breathing room.
Caught in a cycle of destruction and recovery that grows more urgent every year, fire season is no longer a season—it’s a year-round threat.
This is the power of public banking: swift, people-focused, and designed for crisis response. Unlike profit-driven institutions, a public bank—owned by a city or state—would reinvest public deposits into local resilience rather than shareholder dividends. Imagine transforming tax dollars into a renewable resource: funding fire-resistant infrastructure, upgrading aging power grids, and keeping families housed during disasters.
Look around Los Angeles today. Insurers flee high-risk areas, leaving families stranded. Meanwhile, we’re sending more than $1.4 billion a year in debt service fees to Wall Street—this staggering sum, outlined in the City’s 2024/25 Adopted Budget (Page R-71), is money that could fortify hillsides or retrofit homes. Governor Newsom’s $2.5 billion wildfire package helps clear debris, but it doesn’t address the bigger question: How do we fund tomorrow’s disasters without predatory loans that bleed the city dry?
A public bank is the answer. Picture the Bank of North Dakota model scaled for a metropolis. Need emergency credit after the next natural disaster? Done. Low-interest loans for small businesses distributing supplies mid-crisis? No delays. By partnering with local lenders, a public bank could bridge the gap for families waiting months or years for insurance payouts.
This is the power of public banking: swift, people-focused, and designed for crisis response.
This isn’t fantasy. A national public banking movement is rising. In 2019, California passed the Public Banking Act, clearing the legal path for cities like Los Angeles to establish their own public banks. New York City plans a public bank to fund affordable housing and support minority communities. Florida eyes the model for local control of state resources. From San Francisco to New Jersey, cities and states recognize that megabanks can’t meet the scale of today’s economic and environmental challenges. Public institutions keep dollars local, funding fire-resilient housing, green energy projects, and businesses that anchor communities during crises.
During COVID-19, the Bank of North Dakota proved this again. While Wall Street prioritized corporations, the BND partnered with community banks to quickly deliver relief to small businesses and frontline workers. Los Angeles deserves that same agility. A public bank could centralize disaster funds, slash bureaucratic delays, and ensure every dollar stays local—rebuilding neighborhoods instead of enriching distant shareholders.
Housing offers another critical test. Today, financing affordable projects takes years as developers navigate a maze of private lenders. A public bank could create a housing fast-track fund, offering below-market loans for shovel-ready developments. Interest payments would recycle into future projects, not Wall Street bonuses. Streamlined funding means lower costs, faster construction, and more Angelenos housed before the next disaster strikes.
The fight isn’t about resources—it’s about control. A public bank keeps investments local, ensuring funds flow to priorities like firebreaks and microgrids rather than stock buybacks.
Critics argue public banks risk politicization. But the BND’s 105-year track record in a solidly red state disproves this: it's rated A+ by S&P with an 18.2% return on equity in 2023. It’s safer than most big banks and exceptionally stable as a public institution. By law, California’s public banks won’t compete with local community banks, instead, they will partner with them, expanding access to credit in underserved communities.
The money to capitalize a public bank exists. We’ve already raised billions for disaster recovery. The fight isn’t about resources—it’s about control. A public bank keeps investments local, ensuring funds flow to priorities like firebreaks and microgrids rather than stock buybacks.
From LA’s wildfires to Asheville’s floods, disasters are intensifying and demand resilience. Public banking offers a blueprint for recovery: leverage public dollars to cut long-term costs, create jobs, and rebuild smarter.
Los Angeles can lead this revolution. By creating the nation’s first major urban public bank, we’ll pioneer a model for cities nationwide. When the next disaster strikes, we won’t be at the mercy of for-profit banks, we’ll have the tools to rebuild ourselves—faster, fairer, and permanently stronger. The alternative is unthinkable: another decade of rubble, debt, and avoidable loss.