The Week in Review

The Labor Department on Friday said unemployment in September stood at 9.1 percent for the third month in a row. The Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, many of them unemployed themselves, shined a spotlight on greed for a third week in a row. "They have struck a nerve," Sen. Bernie Sanders said. The senator talked about President Obama's jobs bill and the Wall Street protests during a Friday interview with Martin Bashir on MSNBC.

Jobs

Calling on Congress to act on a jobs bill, President Obama on Thursday declared an economic "emergency." At about the same time as the president's press conference, Sanders was speaking on the Senate floor about how millions of jobs could be created by rebuilding America's crumbling roads, bridges, railroads, schools, waterworks, energy systems and other bricks-and-mortar infrastructure projects. As more and more economists worry about a so-called double dip recession, Sanders told fellow senators that real unemployment is more than 16 percent when you count those who have given up looking for jobs and workers forced to settle for part-time jobs. Watch the speech.

Trade

The Senate was on the verge of approving a bill to put high tariffs on some Chinese exports if Beijing fails to adopt a market-driven exchange rate for its currency. Sanders is a cosponsor of the bill that could come to a final Senate vote on Tuesday. He will strenuously oppose, however, new trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama which President Obama sent to Congress on Monday. One of the major reasons the middle class is collapsing and unemployment is unacceptably high is that bad trade deals cost millions of good-paying jobs. During the last 10 years, 50,000 U.S. factories shut down, millions of jobs were lost and it is harder and harder to buy products made in the United States.

Occupy Wall Street

The growing protest movement aimed at the greed of Wall Street drew support from organized labor and from some leaders in Washington. "I applaud them," Sanders told CNN. Even Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke was sympathetic to the protesters when Sanders and another member of the Joint Economic Committee questioned him at a hearing on Tuesday. "They blame, with some justification, the financial sector with getting us into this mess," Bernanke said. Watch Sanders question the Fed chairman. Watch Wolf Blitzer interview the senator about the protests. Watch Keith Olbermann and Sanders discuss class warfare. Read the senator's column posted by The Guardian and The Boston Globe.

Oil and Gas Prices

With oil prices skyrocketing as winter approaches, Sanders wrote a newspaper column making the case for more funds to help seniors and low-income families with children heat their homes. He also kept the heat on federal commodity regulators - the Commodity Futures Trading Commission - to rein in Wall Street speculators. "We need the commission to do its job, obey the law, adopt a rule with some real teeth and eliminate excessive oil speculation," Sanders said. Excessive speculation in the oils futures market is to blame for higher gas prices, not supply and demand, he told CNBC's Jim Cramer. Watch the interview. Read the column.