MSNBC "The Rachel Maddow Show" - Transcript: Interview with Sen. Elizabeth Warren

Interview

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Joining us now is Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts.

Senator Warren, it`s really nice to see you. Thank you very much for making time to be here.

SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN (D-MA): Thank you, it`s good to be with you.

MADDOW: So you drilled down on this issue so specifically in the 2020 campaign, in 2019. I`m wondering, given all the new information we have just learned from the Facebook whistleblower, what sticks out to you right now as the most important thing to focus on?

WARREN: Two years ago, I really thought we needed to break up Facebook. Today, I really, really, really think we need to break up Facebook.

And think of it this way, you know, you have a telephone. I have a telephone. We may use different telephone companies, but we can call each other. We can make that work, with all of the postings, all of the social media you want to do.

[21:45:01]

But the reason we need to break up Facebook is that it`s critically important that there not be one worldwide company that basically has all of the information from everyone. Because they have made it clear what they care about first, second and third is profits, profits, profits, and if that means doing the dance with dictators, if that means telling Donald Trump or Elizabeth Warren you could run ads that lie about your opponents, then they`re fine with that as long as they keep raking the bucks in. And they`re so damn good at it because they have so much information about everyone.

So my view on this is it is time to break up Facebook now.

MADDOW: Is it any more likely that that will happen now than it was in 2019 when you were so vocal about it just a couple of years ago?

WARREN: Yes. We now have ahead of the FTC who has written about the dangerous that this kind of monopoly poses to our country. And understand, it`s an economic monopoly.

You want to buy an ad on Facebook, you know who you go to, you go to Facebook. You go to the dealers, every part of this is controlled by Facebook. The pricing, the buyers, the sellers, every part of it.

But the other part is that they understand the political risks that a company like this threatens. Also, we now have someone in the Justice Department who had shown that he has the courage to stand up to monopolists like Facebook. So I`m really encouraged. We have good laws. I`d like to strengthen them, but we have good laws on the books, and we have people who I believe are going to be willing to pick up those laws and start using them. It will be a tough fight, but my money`s on them.

MADDOW: In terms of getting to the kind of goal that you`re talking about, whether or not the break up of Facebook ultimately happens, and I hear you when you describe why it`s more likely than it previously was, is there room for the Congress essentially to establish regulation in this field around human rights, and around the protections for pluralistic democracies? I mean, if Facebook had been compelled by U.S. law to not respond to a dictator, to not respond to the Putin regime in Russia, and take actions to disadvantage opposition political candidates, if they were constrained by U.S. law in terms of how they were able to answer demands like that, would that make a difference?

MADDOW: Sure. We could have written much better laws over the last decade to be able to constrain. Now, it`s tough, you know, we`ve got lots of free speech issues, and the regulation would be difficult. There`s no doubt about it.

But, yes, we could have done better, but, Rachel, that`s the reminder about what`s wrong with monopolies. It`s not only what they`re doing out of the marketplace, it`s what they`re doing to Washington. It`s how much power Facebook and its lobbyists have in Washington.

And they`re the ones who keep Congress from acting. You know, the reason Congress doesn`t act is because millions of users across the country are saying, oh, please, you know, don`t make life a little tougher for Facebook. I don`t want to have the option of picking from eight or ten or 20 different companies that are competing for my business. I also want to go to Facebook. That`s not the reason at all. It`s the concentrated power.

Remember, that when Teddy Roosevelt, remember the famous trust buster, came in and started breaking up those giant companies around the turn of the last century. The reason he gave was not just about economic power. It was concentrated political power. He did it, he said, to save our democracy.

Well, it`s come to us again. We need to break up Facebook to save our democracy.

MADDOW: Senator Warren, while you`re here I would be remiss if I did not ask you about the reporting in the "Washington Post" over this weekend that you`ve been sort of huddling with Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema who`s been, forgive me, sort of one of the reasons we don`t have major progress in the Senate, and therefore in the country on President Biden`s agenda.

Can you tell us anything about what Senator Sinema is willing to talk to you about and where she might be in terms of how this is going to resolve?

WARREN: So look, I`m not going to talk about private conversations but what I will say is that as Democrats it is important for us not only to have a package of the things we want to get done like universal child care, and universal preschool, and expanded health care, and fighting back against climate change, but also that we pay for it in a way that helps unrig the system at least a little bit.

[21:50:09]

And sure, I like to see us raise corporate rates, raise individual rates, but that`s still not going to solve some of the key problems. Right now, billionaire individuals and billionaire, profitable corporations are paying either little or nothing in taxes, and that is wrong. So we have an opportunity right now to do a billionaire`s tax for, yeah, Jeff Bezos. I`m looking at you. These guys who declare $83,000 in income and, of course, control billions of dollars in assets, and companies like Amazon that declare $10 million in profits publicly and pay nothing in taxes.

If we come in and do a tax on the fewer than 700 billionaires we`ve got and we do it based not on their income, we got to do it based on what they own, and we do a minimum corporate tax, we cannot only help fund a lot of that child care and climate change fight that we need to fund, we can also help make the system a little fairer. So we`ve got some possibilities here.

MADDOW: Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts -- it`s great to see you, Senator. Thanks for being here.

WARREN: Good to see you.

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