End Corporate Greed Rally with Bernie Sanders
Iowa City Ped Mall — Friday, Oct. 25 at 6 p.m.
Sen. Bernie Sanders will hold a rally on the Ped Mall Friday evening, as the final stop on his two-day “End Corporate Greed” tour through Iowa. It will be Sanders’ first appearance in Iowa City since his heart attack earlier this month.
The tour is intended to highlight the Vermont senator’s new “Corporate Accountability and Democracy” plan, which was released on Oct. 14. According to the Sanders campaign, the plan “will give workers an ownership stake in the companies they work for, break up corrupt corporate mergers and monopolies, and finally make corporations pay their fair share.”
The plan calls for “corporations with at least $100 million in annual revenue, corporations with at least $100 million in balance sheet total, and all publicly traded companies [to] 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.”
Those companies would also be required to have 45 percent of their boards of directors “directly elected by the firm’s workers.” The companies would also have to obtain “a federal charter from a newly established Bureau of Corporate Governance at the Department of Commerce,” according to the plan. “This new federal charter will require corporate boards to consider the interests of all of the stakeholders in a company — including workers, customers, shareholders, and the communities in which the corporation operates.”
The plan contains other, slightly less far-reaching provisions intended to ensure large corporations are accountable to their workers and the communities in which they are located.
Sanders also pledges to break up monopolies, review corporate mergers approved during the Trump administration and impose new restrictions on future corporate mergers.
The Ped Mall rally is scheduled to begin at 6 p.m. and last 90 minutes. “Entrance is provided on a first come, first served basis,” according to the Sanders campaign.
Sanders’ last rally in Iowa City was on Sept. 8, which was also the presidential candidate’s 78th birthday.
This is during the Downtown Fall Shop Crawl…