The pharmaceutical industry must be told in no uncertain terms that the medicines that they manufacture for this crisis will be sold at cost. This is… - Bernie Sanders

Research by the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing at Rutgers University has found that employee ownership boosts company productivity by 4 percent, shareholder returns by 2 percent, and profits by 14 percent. This is a case where discarding the old uber-capitalist models and trying something new is good for workers and good for business. That's one of the reasons why I made employee ownership a big issue in my second presidential campaign. Under the plan that we developed during the campaign—and which I have since used as a basis for legislative proposals—corporations with at least $100 million in annual revenue, as well as all publicly traded companies, would be required to provide at least 2 percent of stock to their workers every year until the company is at least 20 percent owned by employees. This would be done through the issuing of new shares and the establishment of Democratic Employee Ownership Funds. These funds would be controlled by a board of trustees directly elected by the workers, and that board would have the right to vote the shares in the best interest of company employees—in the same way that other institutional shareholders vote their shares. The shares would be held in permanent trust for the workers, and so, while they have increase in value, they wouldn't be sold to speculators. But employees would benefit from the increased value through dividends paid directly to them.

In America today, we have more wealth and income inequality than any other major country on Earth and it is worse now than at any other time since the 1920s. Unbelievably, while millions of American workers are forced to work two or three jobs to pay the bills and over half of our people live paycheck to paycheck, the three wealthiest families in our country now own more wealth than the bottom half of Americans – 160 million people.

Billionaires and Wall Street should not be buying elections.