- [Michael] OK.
Am I talking into a camera
or am I just talking
to the senator?
- [Voiceover] Just talking to the senator.
- All right.
We talked on the phone,
but great to meet you.
My name is Michael Render.
- Nice to meet you.
Bernie Sanders.
- Thank you.
I'm professionally known as Killer Mike.
I rap and I rap about a lot of the stuff
that you rant about.
And I want to talk about that.
I'm a kid that grew up on the west side
of Atlanta, not far from here,
working class community, I like money.
I've always considered
myself a capitalist.
I've always tried to
invent ways to make money.
I remember stuff would fall off the back
of a truck, we'd get
it, we'd come to school,
sell it, whether it was
toys, candy, or whatnot
and out of the stuff that I got,
or when my grandpa and I go fishing, we'd
catch extra fish, or one of the neighbors
would grow, at the time, in my community,
people still grew stuff, had chickens in
the backyard, stuff like that,
you'd kill a chicken or get eggs,
you'd take and share it with other people.
- We still have chickens in the backyard
in Burlington, Vermont.
- I definitely should take a visit.
(laughter)
But I say that because
although I consider myself
a capitalist and I wanted
to make money young,
there was a certain compassion to it,
there was a compassionate
capitalism of sorts,
in which I understood I
was a part of a bigger
community, so the lady
named Ruby, whose yard
I used to cut for 25
dollars, I cut her front
and backyard, and when
she start paying me less,
and I complained to my grandmother,
and my grandmother
explained to me that she
didn't have the money she used to have.
She didn't have the money she used to have
because her Medicaid something
like that got affected.
But I stayed doing the job because I knew
that her yard needed to be
cut, deserved to be cut.
She deserved to have
the dignity that she'd
always had.
And then I started learning
about in high school,
tenants of other political systems
besides capitalism, socialism, communism,
what a despot is, and socialism,
although preached in a very scary way,
boogey man like way to
citizens of this country now,
is not foreign.
You were born in 1941.
Essentially, Franklin Deleanor
Roosevelt still president.
The things that he was
proposing at the time,
like social security,
things of that nature,
were considered socialism
taking us on the road to
communism--
- [Bernie] You got it.
- And I think that's
something very mean and damn
near evil that's said when
you're talked about because it
doesn't represent what I
think your real philosophy is,
and people of my community,
my ethnic community,
haven't had an opportunity
to hear you simply say
these are the things I think, so what is
socialism, and what does it
mean to the black community?
- All right.
What it means to me, what it
means to the black community,
what it means to the
American community, is the
understanding that when we
talk about rights, right?
You have freedom of speech,
you can go out on the
street corner, give a speech.
You have the constitutional
right to do that.
But you know what?
To be truly free, you need
economic rights as well.
All right, so you can go
out and give a speech,
but if you don't have
any food in your stomach,
you don't have a house,
roof over your head,
or you don't have any education,
are you really free?
And I think that in the
richest country in the history
of the world, like which
is what we are right now,
we can do infinitely better
in providing economic
rights to our people.
So, when I talk about
democratic socialism,
this is what I say.
You have a right,
regardless of your income,
to healthcare.
I believe that.
Whether you're rich, whether you're poor,
you're old, young, black, white, you have
a right to healthcare.
You have a right to have an education.
And I think in the year
2015, you have a right
to have free tuition in public
colleges and universities
if you have the ability.
I don't think if you're
poor, you should be denied
that education.
All right?
I think you have a right
to have a decent job
that pays you a living
wage, and you can't make it
on seven and a quarter
an hour, which is why
we have to raise the minimum wage,
and why we need pay
equity for women workers.
So, what I am talking
about, when I talk about
democratic socialism, is
to make sure that in the
richest country in the
history of the world,
which is what we have
right now, that everybody
at least has a minimal standard of living
and some dignity as a result of that.
- So, at the end of the
day, people want to get
paid a fair wage.
- [Bernie] Exactly.
- Because people get paid a fair wage,
people will get to have
fair living conditions.
- Absolutely.
- People will get to
spend more time at home
with their children, which
gives children a bonus
of confidence of, "I should
go to school and perform well
"because now I have a parent
that's in the household
"that can help me."
- Mike, you're making a
huge point, which we don't
talk about all that often.
When I was growing up, 400 years ago,
do you know that one person in those days,
often the man, could work 40 hours a week
and provide for the family?
And today, what are you
seeing, all over America?
You're seeing husbands and
wives working incredibly long
hours, are they spending
the time with the kids
that they should be spending?
- They can't.
- [Bernie] They can't.
So the kids are hanging
out on the street corners,
kids are getting into trouble,
and on and on it goes.
And again, in the richest
country in the history
of the world, we should
not be having the highest
level of childhood poverty
of almost any major
country on Earth.
- But, I guess Senator Sanders, like,
where are people not seeing the connect?
Like, to me all these
things are interconnected.
I grew up organizing right down the street
with a group of suburban
kids, rowdy gang member kids,
regular BNA student kids, C and D kids,
right down the street,
led by a woman named
Alice Johnson from Chicago.
And she introduced me to the
tenants of social justice.
- Good.
- [Michael] Right?
I didn't know what social justice was.
We all were just like, "We're
out here trying to live.
"What is social justice?"
And my first lesson in social justice,
where she organized on the behalf of the
Atlanta Folk's Commission
on Children and Youth.
Where a woman named Jean Child Young,
Andrew Young's late wife, and she said,
"There's no way I'm gonna organize on
"the behalf of kids, and not have kids
"a part of that process,
not have kids a part
"of that talk."
So, you seem to be the
only candidate that is
inclusive of ideas that you just can bring
to the table, ideas other people, like
I'm literally here on a tweet.
I'm here because I tweeted,
I thought your ideas
were progressive and I
loved to have a conversation
with you, and the response
is that you're here.
That's a very different
narrative than anyone running
for national office,
especially US president.
You are different.
Why?
(intense music)
