Bernie Sanders came to Harlem on Friday to the historic Apollo Theater for a panel discussion with civil rights activists.

He was asked about former President Bill Clinton‘s clash earlier this week with protesters in Philadelphia. Demonstrators there confronted Clinton over a 1994 crime bill he signed into law which led to a surge in black people being imprisoned. The protesters also said Hillary Clinton was insensitive to call young people “super predators” who need to “be brought to heel.’ President Clinton defended his wife’s remarks.

“The president owes the American people an apology for trying to defend the indefensible,” Sanders said. He called the president’s remark “unacceptable.”

Sanders also faulted a Clinton-era welfare reform bill that the senator blamed for a spike in extreme poverty in the United States.

If he’s elected president, Sanders said, “We’re not going to be beating up on the poor.”

The exchanges came during a panel discussion with singer and activist Harry Belafonte, former Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner and Erica Garner. Her father, Eric Garner, was choked to death by police on Staten Island in 2014 for selling loose cigarettes.

Spike Lee, the famous filmmaker, was scheduled to be on the panel but was unable to participate. He did produce a television commercial for Sanders that the campaign released on Saturday.

The community discussion took place on the same stage where many of Sanders’ Motown favorites – Aretha Franklin, James Brown, The Supremes – had once performed.

Walking on stage, the senator honored an old Apollo Theater tradition and rubbed the stump, a tradition begun by contestants performing in Amateur Night to rub the tree for good luck.

“It is an honor to be in this iconic theater,” Sanders said.

https://berniesanders.com/unacceptable/

As runaway inequality took off in the 1980s, Hillary's political ambitions took off as well, first for Bill in Arkansas, then for Bill as president, and then, at long last, for herself. Her peer group always included these Ivy League elites. Many of her former classmates moved up into elite law firms and into the highest financial circles. Her peers were making millions, tens of millions and some even billions of dollars.

These wealthy elites became the financial glue of Bill's campaigns. That's why we'll never see the transcripts of her $225,000 Wall Street speeches. Those talks would show the side Hillary has trained herself to hide from the public. These elites are her friends, her supporters, her funders. Turning on them would be like turning on herself and all she's become and wants to become.

Those speeches would show the real Hillary who became the senator from Wall Street, who made $9.1 million from speaking fees in 2013, and who along with her husband raked in over $130 million over the last decade.

Little wonder she rejects all proposals that would redistribute financial wealth to the rest of society. No financial speculation tax to fund free higher education. No break-up of the big banks. No new Glass-Steagall.

Instead, she makes a passionate plea for a world built on the kind of meritocracy that shot her to top. "Break all barriers" so that each of us can live up to "our god-given talents." She wants rich and poor alike to join the race to riches. But she has trouble admitting the obvious; we never can start equally in a world run wild with runaway inequality.

She is incapable of understanding that wealth must be redistributed from her Wall Street friends, from her daughter, from her son-in-law, from Bill and from herself to the rest of America, if we are to reverse runaway inequality. That's the barrier we must break.

Hillary Clinton was never a financially struggling college graduate, and she'll never understand what struggling students are going through now.

NEW YORK – U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Saturday called for raising Social Security benefits to help seniors make ends meet. He also urged Hillary Clinton to back a plan endorsed by leading Democrats and seniors’ advocates to strengthen the retirement program.

Sanders’ stops at Bronx Community College and at the United Palace in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood were part of a presidential campaign tour of New York City boroughs.

More than 1,000 backers turned out to hear Sanders in Washington Heights and more than 800 supporters in the Bronx packed an auditorium in the Gould Memorial Library and an overflow room at the college.

Sanders said seniors in New York and across the United States don’t have enough income to heat their homes or feed themselves and many are forced to cut their pills in half to save money on prescription drugs. “These are the people who built this country – our parents, our grandparents. We should not be treating them that way.”

Clinton, Sanders’ rival for the Democratic Party nomination, has refused to back Sanders’ plan to strengthen Social Security. In fact, Clinton has left open the possibility that she would support raising the retirement age at which seniors become eligible for Social Security. “I would consider it,” she told a town meeting in New Hampshire last Oct. 28.

In New York, more than 3.5 million seniors, orphans, widows, widowers and disabled people received Social Security benefits last year. The average annual benefit totaled only $15,000.

Without Social Security, more than 43 percent of the elderly in New York, including more than 48 percent of senior women, would be living in poverty. With Social Security, the elderly poverty rate in New York is 11.6 percent.

Sanders has introduced legislation to make the wealthiest Americans who make more than $250,000 a year pay the same share of their income into the retirement system as everyone else. Current law now caps the amount of income subject to payroll taxes at $118,500.

Under Sanders’ plan, a senior making less than $16,000 a year would see income go up by more than $1,300 a year.

The measure also would increase cost-of-living adjustments. This year, for only the third time in four decades, seniors on Social Security did not receive a cost-of-living increase. Sanders’ legislation would increase COLAs by more accurately measuring the spending patterns of seniors. Under current law, the consumer price index used to calculate annual benefit adjustments does not accurately reflect how inflation in health care costs and prescription drug prices impact seniors.

The proposal to lift the cap would raise taxes only on the wealthiest 1.5 percent of Americans. Sanders’ plan is patterned after a proposal to scrap the cap first brought forward by President Barack Obama in 2008.

According to new estimates from the Social Security Administration, Sanders’ plan would extend the solvency of Social Security until the year 2074.

The senator from Vermont who was born and raised in Brooklyn was headed later Saturday to a third rally in Queens before capping the day with a nighttime event at the Apollo Theater in Harlem.