 Welcome to what I think is going to be a very informative and interesting evening and I am especially delighted and I want to get the pronunciation right that we have the ambassador from Finland and that is Mikola Hotala. Finnish names are hot and then we have the first secretary from the embassy Maria Kogel. So what we'll do this evening is I'm going to chat with the ambassador and Maria for a while and then we'll open it up to questions but the reason I asked the ambassador to join us in Vermont today and we were down at Harvard Union High School in the afternoon is I think it's terribly important for people in our state and in the country to understand that what goes on in the United States is very different than what goes on in terms of social programming in countries around the world and I think our corporate media and our political system do not do a particularly good job of educating Americans about options that are open to us that already exist in countries around the world. The ambassador was telling me before and I took it as a compliment that my views which in this country are you know I'm part of the extreme left in Finland would be what mainstream I said boring mainstream boring I took that as a great compliment and it's true the ideas that many of us have been fighting for our ideas that have existed not just in Finland but Scandinavia other countries for decades for a variety of reasons they're not even discussed here in the United States so when they are discussed they're seen as extremely radical pying to sky utopian ideas so Mr. Ambassador please sit down Rhea please sit down let's begin for the last five years Finland has been has been entirely called the happiest country on earth they're doing you know they're organizations that do intensive polling around the world and they ask people how they feel about their lives and they compile the information and for the last five years Finland has been literally on top over the other Scandinavian countries Nordic countries have also done very well so my first question for the ambassador is why do you think Finland ranks top in the world in terms of human happiness thank you senator and first of all thanks for the invitation and it's great to be here it's my second time in Vermont I'm really happy and excited to have spent very happy this is what happy people are actually when I tell people that Finland continues to be the happiest nation on earth usually people get a critical look and they can look at me and they say I mean you don't look so happy you look actually pretty serious then I always say that's because I'm seriously happy but on a more sort of sort of substantial note I would say that the the key reason for our happiness is definitely not the climate it's not the 800 mile common border with Russia it's it's not the you don't have it's not the 2.5 million saunas in our country it's not the fact that we drink more coffee than any other nation in the world this might might contribute a bit I don't exclude that totally but I think the main reason for our continued situation is that uh Finnish people do have a very high degree of trust in the institutions and in each other so I think for most of the people in Finland life is and I stress the words relatively kind of stress-free because you don't really have I mean I don't think of my health care issues ever in Finland because there's no real reason to do so because if I get sick I know I will get the treatment and I know that my life I mean my life will be might be in danger but still I know that I get the treatment and my family will be will be okay even after that so also studying education we know that regardless of the origins we get the good education it's also regardless of where do we live I'm the ambassador here this my second ambassador of posting Maria is is is is here we are actually from the same town and actually our parents were in exactly similar blue color professions so it's kind of a of course she's a bit younger than I am so but but it tells you that I think we are our life is stable and in that sense stress-free it's not problem-free we all have problems we all have the same kind of issues and challenges but still I think that's the reason that people are not perhaps ecstatic like you said but they are fairly content and and they can trust and and they can plan their lives knowing that certain key parameters of your life will will be protected I think that's the reason all right what I want to do now is just go over various aspects of Finnish life and I think the American people would be really shocked and you know and that's why we do these things to hear what goes on in Finland so I want to start off with all right you got a young couple they're pregnant uh and one asks Maria has a one-year-old baby yes so this is for her not an abstract idea yeah grab the mic there of what kind of benefits Maria were you able to you know other Swedish Swedish Finnish families able to benefit from during pregnancy yes thank you thank you senator so at the moment I'm working mom but before I returned to work I spent six months at home with the baby and then afterwards my husband spent another six months with the baby and you may ask like how is this possible like financially so in Finland the system is that for the first three months after your baby is born you basically get your full salary and then afterwards for the rest of the like until up to one year and nowadays actually even a bit longer I think it's like 14 months like the system just recently changed so I unfortunately was not able to enjoy the new system but even the old one is pretty good so up to one year you got around like 60 percent of your normal salary which is sort of like a parental allowance that is paid by the state so it's not your full salary but you it's still pretty good I would say you survive all right so let's recapitulate here you have when you give birth three months full pay yes and then you have the rest of the year at about 60 percent pay around that yeah okay now in this country right now we have no pay family a medical leave it from the federal government there are thousands and thousands of women lower income women who give birth and are forced to go back to work a week or two after they give birth all right which to my mind is barbaric it's a matter of fact all right that's a contrast all right let's go the next step you have in the United States in Finland you're working in this country about 80 percent households are two breadwinners in each household so mom and dad are both working here in Vermont which is about the national average cost 15 000 bucks to have a decent child care for your kids 15 000 that's average Maria has her kid in Washington DC which is very expensive how much is the cost you in Washington so in DC the prices they tend to arrive between 30 up to 35 000 per year which is well a huge sum of money so in various in Washington maybe as high as any place in the country up to 35 000 nationally in the country 15 000 just like you're an average family you're making 60 70 000 a year single mom making 40 000 here how do you possibly afford 15 000 now there are programs that will help lower income people to be sure but child care is a very expensive proposition if you can find quality child gift there's a slot available for you people have to wait for a long time to get decent child care all right tell us about child care in in Finland so in Finland most of the child care like centers are municipal we have some private options available as well but like most kids go to municipal child care and the cost of the child care is based on your income so the minimum that you spend is like 30 dollars per month and the maximum is up to like 300 dollars a month all right so you're talking about maximum yes maximum for upper income people yes 3600 a year compared to on average 15 000 a year all right now it turns out and we can take some questions on it later it's a very interesting issue Finland is often also right in terms of its educational system it's number one in the world and it's a very different system it's unlike the Chinese or in Singapore where they really put a lot of pressure on the kids their approach is very different but before we go there I want to talk about higher education Mr Ambassador okay everybody you know we send our kids to college we got 45 million Americans dealing with student debt talk about the cost of higher college and graduate school in Finland well it's pretty short story there is no no fees so no no fees for tuition so it's it's free you have to pass the exam which is based on your skills your abilities if you pass it then it's it's free you have to pay like in Helsinki University you have to pay I think 200 dollars as a payment for membership of the student association which then gives you the access to the student medical care which has a separate medical station and medical care so it's I think the obligatory fee is 200 dollars a year all right so in our country where so many people are struggling A with student debt would be even questioning whether they want to go to college and come out with that huge debt what they have decided in a competitive global economy it makes sense for all the kids who are able and want to get a higher education to be able to do so tuition free they also are strong in technical education can you say a word about that yeah well of course I mean we all do realize that modern economy also needs working hands with skills so that's why we put a lot of emphasis on vocational training so it's actually one of the basic roots of school so when you are 16 you can actually choose a vocational school which takes two three years but I think for us the main point is that you need to have a good basic level of education why because the demands of the work life economy will change so you have to be able to retrain for different professions during your work life time so we try to give everybody a good basic level education then they can choose more academics kind of a path or vocational training it depends on what they want to do and but it's it's all I mean and vocational training you get the same same benefits so it's it's not it's not separate in terms of how you are being treated it's the same same system all right um I want to skip to an issue dear to my heart and that is the health care issue as I think all of you know we spend about if you can believe this it's really quite incredible anybody have any idea here how much we spend per person on health care what's the guess what's the guess per person for if you met a woman a child in America what do you guess right now get a year yeah no I mean anyone have a guess no yeah how much no all right the answer is $12,000 per person per person so think about it if you're a family of four in America you are spending $48,000 there are many families that don't make $48,000 obviously you should know we have a very complicated system we have Medicaid we got Medicare we have veterans in meditation you got Obama Obamacare and most people get that care through their jobs okay so it's a complicated system but at the end of the day we spend more than twice as much per capita as they spend in Finland or in Canada and yet somehow they managed to provide quality the care in your country is pretty high yes yeah well that's one of the highest quality care systems in the world for half the price and it's a much simpler less bureaucratic less aggravating system than we have but all right so tell us Mr. Ambassador somebody becomes ill they end up in the hospital for two weeks what's the story there in terms of drugs and health care costs what do they end up paying I hope the story ends positively but in terms of economy it's also pretty simple because you have to pay as your contribution a small fraction of the real real cost which means that's a usually after a couple of weeks in hospital we are talking about few hundreds of dollars not thousands are you got that you're in the hospital for two weeks anybody been in the hospital in Vermont or any place else in America for two weeks what's the bill tens could be tens and tens of thousands of dollars pardon me one million yeah I a friend of mine a colleague of mine in the Senate told me that her niece had a back operation wasn't even a life-saving operation it's serious not life-saving it's about the million dollars all right now she didn't have to pay the million because you know but we got something like 500,000 people in this country go bankrupt because of medically related bills so I want you all to think about it somebody has cancer they have some terrible disease they're struggling with this disease and then when they got out of the hospital they got to figure out how they can pay some huge amount of money if they don't have good insurance and then their credit is destroyed they got to declare bankruptcy so you go bankrupt because you are sick does anything that make any sense to anybody I mean it is a horror show all right the system is very different in Finland and I think they do the right thing I want to ask the ambassador a few more questions and then we can well let me the obvious question some of you may be thinking well hey free healthcare that's good free education that's good how much am I paying in taxes do I have anything left after I get paid what is the tax system and how much do people pay for these services well tax system is progressive so it depends on your earned income the more you earn the more you pay personally I don't know what Maria pays or anyone else but there's a private information but I'm open for transparency so my tax rate is and I'm a high income person by Finnish standards my tax rate is 33 percent of the income then I have a so-called kind of a maximum rate so if I earn more than this maximum rate which is a six figure number then they take 51 percent out of that amount of money which exceeds that selling selling some of money so but basically during a normal year unless I work through the night's extra hours so my tax rate is 33 okay so you know it's high it's high but you know I don't know how much higher it is than in the United States and what they get for that is they don't have to pay private health insurance they don't have to pay for the kinds of costs that we have in terms of childcare they don't have to worry about how do they're going to send their kids to college among many other things all right here's an interesting issue I have been long concerned about how corporate media functions in this country and the kind of built-in conflict of interest between billionaires who own the media and what media reports and in Finland interestingly enough they're tackling that problem and I want the ambassador to speak to it but as many of you know in the United States and here in Berlin even you know it used to be the free press but whatever you might say about it they were a major paper they are now a skeleton compared to what they used to be and what's happened is Gannett and all these other big change have downsized they can't make enough money now in papers because of the internet okay so you have many hundreds of communities all over America who have no daily newspapers at all it's a very serious problem talk a little bit about how the public how Finland handles media other than just private media what do you guys do there well first of all we have freedom of expression it's a constitutional right so we share the same principles of free and open media most of the media is private it's commercial but then we also have I would call it in front of this audience a Finnish BBC if you know the British model so we have publicly funded national broadcasting company I think they of course they are not partisan they are not allowed to be it would be illegal to kind of be partisan there's also a committee in the parliament which kind of watches over that it doesn't turn against somebody according to some partisan lines so I think the benefit of that company in my view is that actually it can offer people more variety in terms of programs because not all the programs or shows that they they they transmit they don't have to be equally profitable so they can actually provide better service for the public of course it's you always there has to be a balance and of course the private media commercial media is really important and that's the most the biggest chunk of the Finnish media market is is private then I will just add on on how to deal with the information we have focused quite a lot already for a couple of years and even longer how to teach our kids so-called media literacy so they can actually understand how the media how the media works how the news are being made what are the criteria and they are also trained to see and understand different agendas so that they are critical towards whatever media they use whatever news they get so that they understand this aspect of course the idea is to give them a so-called vaccination against propaganda this information so that they can critically treat the information wherever they get it from um right now obviously we've got elections here in three weeks so it's very much on my mind in this country we have a campaign finance system that allows all of you billionaires to spend as much money as you want on the candidates you want to win or going after the candidate you want to defeat or we have a two-party system basically um tell us a little bit about the Finnish political system and campaign finance and so forth well the political system is we are a parliamentary democracy so the president we have a president too he mainly focuses on foreign policy and and defense issues so he doesn't have so extensive a mandate across the board of national policies like in the US so the main sort of governing body is the government and and they always have to have a majority in the parliament so parliament is the real source of also the government power so all the laws obviously have to be passed with a majority in our case we have nine parties in the parliament uh and uh uh basically I mean I might get in trouble in the Finnish media if I say so but basically all of them and I don't name them all of them except for one perhaps might qualify as as some fraction of the US democratic party one of them I guess could be considered according to us uh kind of a political style they could perhaps be Republicans so that's the system so we have a lot of parties they are competing for power there's no single party that can ever dominate the system because even the biggest party they typically get 20 plus so it means that they have to negotiate they always have to find partners the other parties and they have to form the government so that they can together a must sufficient number of votes in the parliament which has 200 seats so uh I think the culture in our case is that uh you have to negotiate you have to govern together and also because you know that you might end up in the government with that party you may even dislike that party but since you have to be ready to govern together I think it kind of moderates a bit the way how policies are being conducted and how the politics is being made so that's the system the elections we have every four years you have every other year so it's it's it's every four years when the whole parliament is being elected obviously there are rules how to finance the the the parties how to finance the candidates I think I'm not going to give any political assessment on the U.S. elections or U.S. political system as an ambassador I'm not allowed to even do that but I just say that in our case it is different and I think we are really critical towards the role of these financial contributions to campaign so we have limitations there's a lot of public scrutiny over that financing so if a millionaire liked a certain candidate could that very wealthy person put an unlimited amount of money into a campaign no it can't be really unlimited it would be and basically I also think that uh politically let's put it this way if I would be a candidate and I would find a nice millionaire who would like to totally finance my campaign like give millions or hundreds of thousands that would politically be a case of death for me it's kind of a because the it would be known and I think my political career would be over before it starts in the United States that's how we begin I don't know about that okay um I don't have to tell anybody in this room that the climate change uh is an incredible threat uh to the planet uh and in my view at least we need to very rapidly move away from fossil fuel to energy efficiency and sustainable energy uh what is Finland doing with regard to climate well we have I think the most ambitious climate policy within Europe our goal is to become climate carbon neutral by 2035 which is really an ambitious target we are making good progress in our case we are producing already more energy from renewable sources than from fossil fuels of course it's a difficult difficult task in Finland because because of the climate we have to heat our homes and actually that takes a lot of energy then as a kind of a counterbalance we are lucky to have more forests than any other nation in Europe 76 of the forest and of course as you know forests are also carbon sinks so it kind of compensates our emissions so that's why we do believe and actually we now have basically 50 percent more of a forest or trees in our forests than we had 50 years ago so by having a sustainable forest management uh techniques we've been able to grow the wood mass that's growing in the forest which means that's uh uh frankly we can also we can compensate the emissions that we have right now we are heavily trying to kind of increase the number of electric cars I think in our case these are greener cars because we have a lot of nuclear power in Finland it's 36 38 percent depending on the on the day that we get from the nuclear which is emission free so we are moving steadily along that path I think now the and by the way coal is going to be illegal in Finland at 20 29 so uh so many many municipalities that use used coal they are already getting rid of that replacing it that with something else and then we have wind wind power is increasing fast we are really putting a lot of new capacity and wind power construction in Finland is commercially viable so they don't get any subsidies at all so they they it has to be self self financing and self it has to be commercially and actually that at the moment it's the cheapest way of getting new energy the problem with the wind of course in our case is that since it doesn't wind always so the energy grid gets unstable unless you have nuclear and some other sources in Finland also I just want to I know that Vermont this is a slightly atypical case in the US because you have a lot of energy produced from wood materials like sawdust residue that you get from the forestry industry that's the same case for Finland so we get a lot of biofuels from our forest but still I want to say that we use biofuels sustainably which means that like I said we try to make sure that we have sufficient numbers of forests all the time growing so that we don't end up in a situation in which many European countries ended up already hundreds of years ago they don't have any forests because they cut all the trees so we can't afford that we have to maintain our forests okay the last question I wanted to raise is that Finland has an 800 mile border with Russia so obviously what's going on in Ukraine and Russia's aggressiveness is a concern to the Finnish people the ambassador before he came to the United States was the Finnish ambassador to Moscow so he knows a little bit about Russia why don't you talk a little bit about your assessment of the Ukrainian situation well my first kind of takeaway from that situation is that it's going to last a long time why I think the key reason is that for President Putin Ukraine is actually the only item on his political agenda right now he doesn't seem to have any other meaningful policies it's everything is about Ukraine he has an idea that which comes from the Russian imperial past that for some mystical reasons they have a right to govern another country and other people they even denies the existence of Ukrainian people so I think it's when you have this kind of a really deep ideological grounds for the conflict and you have a population which is largely accepting this aggression I think it's going to be the long-term thing for the Ukrainians I think it's easy for us to understand because we've been having a number of wars in the past with the Russians Ukrainians are fighting for their own homeland they absolutely have nowhere to go if they lose it it's very hard sometimes for Americans to understand what it means when your own home territory is under threat because you guys don't you don't have to worry about the Canadians coming across the border like like I don't think nobody loses sleep over that at least a healthy person so I think that's the major difference and like the senator said I know that you are admiring the the social and healthcare systems in the Nordic countries but I just want to add that it's it's really for us it doesn't work without the military security because we are living in a rough neighborhood that's the reason why we are we actually make all the NATO numbers we spend heavily on the military not because we want to spend but simply because we have to spend in order to stay safe to build a kind of society that the Finns want to build a reason why we are also seeking membership with NATO is that we want to make sure that we are not alone and I think we believe that by joining NATO we can increase not only our own safety and security but also the security of the alliance and and not many people know that but we really do take defense seriously and just to give you one example all the men are obliged to serve all the men go to the army usually after high school I did serve and I can tell you a story when I was I actually moved back from Moscow end of July 2020 I took my family I have two small kids we drove from Moscow to Helsinki I parked the car in the middle of the night my wife took my kids inside I said to her I'll go to check the mailbox the first piece of paper I took out of the mailbox was a military order for me to report for duty 4th of September that year the second piece of paper I took out I had been away for a couple of months was the the letter from the mobilization office that why haven't you confirmed your attendance in the in the reserve training then the next day I wrote to the mobilization office that hey I'm supposed to be the new Finnish ambassador to the US 1st of September so it's kind of hard for me to in the middle of the pandemic to fly back and forth to be training with you 4th of September so could I get accepted and I included in the mail my military staff in Moscow I was still technically the ambassador of Finland to Moscow and then I waited that this will do the trick next day comes a reply from the mobilization office saying that how can you documentally prove that you are a new ambassador to the US then I started to think that I mean there's how many fake ambassadors are there trying to get accepted but basically I got accepted and this time next time you are not so this is the but there's a reason it's not that we are militaristic or anything like that but we simply have to make sure that we can build our society free of outside aggression and influence okay okay let's open it up for questions um how are we doing this all right raise your hand and Haley we'll find you Haley why don't we do something unusual start from the back and come on up we'll get to you guys keep the questions brief if you can offering like your comment on this people say oh well the reason why you do so well in your country is because it's so small and I thought you know if I look on the map and I see the size of Finland and I go through the United States map find a comparable size state and say hey why can't we adopt national you know healthcare system and date here and so on there and then it'll be bringing up one state and then we can point say hey it worked over here and then spread it but no I think that's an excellent point you know sometimes people say well they got five and a half million we have 330 million why are you comparing it's apple star but you're quite right many of our programs are developed and shaped by states themselves we have states of the same size as Finland we're smaller can we learn something and adopt those ideas absolutely I mean that they spend less than half as much as we do on healthcare is that something that we can learn from I think so okay good point okay let's go to the back Haley and move it on off yeah question yeah by the time you got there people dropped their hands all right thank you so much for your time first of all but hold on Michael a little bit close to you my jumping right into climate knowing that Finland has taken such aggressive aggressive action as of late and that Biden did recently pass our own climate bill I was wondering if we had any more legislation coming through because the aggression that we took was not as strict as what Finland did knowing that the US is a much larger country and has many more companies and things like that so what's the plan in my view you know people get upset and they see what happened this last summer we see the heat waves in Europe in China we see the drought in the west coast of this country we have seen thousand year storms five of them this summer alone in the United States and you know what if we do not act boldly and aggressively it's only going to get worse because you know we used to think oh there was a terrible storm probably won't see that for a few more years wrong everything being equal you'll see more of it with more intensity so it is my view that this is a crisis situation we have to act almost in a war like matter go to war against climate what complicates the issue is that this is a global problem China is a bigger emitter of carbon than we are and one of the many disturbing aspects of the war in Ukraine is that Russia now is isolated and Russia is going to have to play a role in transforming our energy system so to answer your question we made a start by putting a lot of money into sustainable energy into electric vehicles and so forth but we've got a long long way to go you mentioned that you rely about 35 or so percent of your energy on nuclear power which makes some of us kind of cringe but I wanted to ask about the standards of disposal from the nuclear power and how you run those power plants because you know we most of us here remember Chernobyl and then like earthquake in Japan what it did to the nuclear power plant there great question Mr. Bessler yes so we like I said we use a lot of nuclear I think it's up to be honest it's the only choice we have because in our case we don't have so much hydro as the Swedes and Norwegians why because it's a flat land mostly so there are not no no no rivers of that size of that sort of magnitude so we have to cover that with nuclear the other choice would be some fossil fuels with emissions so that's the reason why we have to have to have it then how to dispose to that nuclear waste we have now opened I would say I'm of course trying to put Finland in the best possible light but I think I'm I'm correct here we have developed a so-called it doesn't tell you much but it the name is on color it's a it's a really deep sort of tunnel in the deep rock and there's no seismic activity basically Finland is sort of free of seismic activity so the risks of anything leaking out out of that deep tunnel is is is totally theoretical and it's it's totally much better than how do you deal with the waste in most places where the waste can be even so waiting outside waiting to get get treatment and so on so I think for us the clear point is that we need to have as credible as science and and any any practical consideration can keep a solution for the how to where to maintain where to keep this that waste but as I said our conclusion is you cannot have a strong economy strong industry without sufficient level of base energy and and and for us since it doesn't always wind and we cannot fill the whole country with the those windmills then you have to have that source and that's the that's the only alternative actually okay Haley yes I'd like to understand a little more about your tax system as in like corporate tax rates how do you tax corporations if you do what's the maximum personal tax rate you graciously shared your 33 percent and our citizens filing tax returns and getting big tax breaks or dodging taxes in some other way because that's you know we we all know in America that are very rich don't pay their share how do you solve that problem well I think you know to really fully respond to your good question I think I would need to find a tax accountant or consultant in Finland it of course you have all these details I think if you go into the really high income brackets then the tax rate I think these days if you really earn in in several hundreds of thousands or millions then the tax rate this is somewhere I mean roughly half or even even sometimes beyond historically speaking this is not much in many of the European countries you even had higher tax rates and I think in the US also in history tax rates have been have been much much higher so I think it it goes to like 50 percent so but I can't I've never I mean if I sometimes it will earn those incomes I will tell you what's that but say it's not what about corporate corporate rate I think now it's like 28 oh yeah I think it is it is close to close to 30 yeah that's the corporate rate okay thanks for your time so the Finnish ambassador mentioned how most people in Finland have a very deep seated trust in the institutions of government here in the United States I must say the culture is not necessarily that uniform so my question to the senator is how do we change the culture here in America to have a more deep-seated trust in American government institutions in order to enact sort of these programs that we all want to achieve well the American people are mistrustful of their government for good reason and just think about it for a moment the two last wars that we were engaged in in Iraq and in Vietnam were based on lies and God knows how many around Vietnam we lost 59,000 in Iraq and Afghanistan fewer but they were based on on lies you have a political system as I mentioned earlier which nobody denies I mean right now I follow this thing very obviously closely you have billionaires spending huge amounts of money on campaigns right now who elect people who do their bidding so you have you know you all know my politics and I'm not here to tell you that the Democrats do a particularly good job they don't it's a lot better in my view than the Republicans do but I'm not going to tell you're an average person in this country do you know that you in real inflation adjusted dollars you're earning less than somebody 50 years ago did you know that anyone know that in other words can you think when I was mayor here in Burlington when I took office we didn't have a computer in the building we didn't have one printer think about how the world has changed since the early 1980s so that all of us are far more productive than we used to be and people are earning less in real inflation adjusted dollars than they did 50 years ago so if you know that worker there or you're that worker who has seen his or her job go to China or to Mexico if you're one of the 60% of Americans today who are living paycheck the paycheck while three people are more wealth in the bottom half of America do you think you're gonna fake the government gives a damn about you you know and you know what you're right all right it's a corrupt political system and it's a rigged economic system that's what it is rich get richer working people struggle billionaires buy and sell politicians so why should anybody have faith in that system and I think people have become so demoralized and this is what has happened historically is they look to a strong person they look to somebody who's I know what the problem is in your country it's immigrants it's black people it's gay people it's Muslims you name but the person and you just divide up the population and you come into power that is what we're struggling with right this very minute I'm gonna be running all over the country next week trying to deal with this issue or to try to save American democracy so that the moralization is very deep it has a lot to do with people who are living in despair are going nowhere in a hurry and they don't quite know why they're working hard and their kids are in worse shape economically than they are they can't retire with dignity half the people elderly people this country have income of 25,000 or less most older workers have nothing in the bank so how would you feel about how the government is working for you not very well so you know you know you're looking at somebody who works with other people trying to build a movement which brings people together around an agenda that works for all and the good news is that most Americans would be supportive of a system like Finland's for health care most Americans think that public education at least community colleges should be tuition free most Americans think billionaires should stop paying their fair share of taxes most Americans know that our child care system is dysfunctional more and more Americans understand that we've got to be bold about climate change most Americans know that women have a right to control their own bodies etc etc so on all of those issues there is a coming together but then you have to ask yourself why we don't even talk about those issues do you hear anybody other than me talking about income and wealth inequality why not do you think it's a good political issue because politicians don't want to antagonize the billionaires who contribute to their parties do you know how much that's spending in the selection hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars that's where the ads are coming on television where do you think that money comes from i know where it comes from all right comes to the wealthiest people in this country so it takes a whole lot of work and that's what we're trying to do now but i'm not going to tell you that it's easy and i'm not going to tell you this country is not in very difficult straits but thanks for the question back to the structure of your social life in Finland i'm wondering if um that style is diminishing criminality mental health addiction by allowing people to live that way or homeless is it is there a diminishing in all these issues that we have because of our lifestyle uh madam i'd like to i'd love to say to you that uh my country is a paradise unfortunately it's not so we also have all those trouble all those problems i think with the mental issues i think we are not we are somewhere in the average of the like we used to call them always see the countries the western developed industrialized countries i think i don't have to compare the figures with the us so it's very hard for me to say where we stand with the us figures um on the drug use um that's so that's that's a problem uh definitely um again no comparative figures homelessness i think here i can add some elements uh we used to have that problem very serious in the south of Finland uh still in the 80s how we have been able to 75 so we are down to uh like roughly four or five thousand uh people uh uh which are homeless i think the key to that progress was the understanding that our social service is made in the 90s they did understand that uh an apartment or a place to live cannot be a kind of a reward for a person who can prove that they can work they can they can hold a job they can kind of live more or less stable life because the problem is that uh if they don't have a place to live you can't fix all those other problems so you have to start from giving them a place to live then you can actually from that starting point you can actually start fixing all the other problems like addictions etc health problems and economic problems so i think that's been one of the great successes we've had on the homelessness front but that has required um lots of learning and also lots of uh work from our social services but but it's it's been it's been a success mr sanders um as a young person uh in our society seeing all of the flaws in all of america what can i do as a young person what can we all do besides voting thank you well i i think look here is just a few basic principles that i operate under which i think are true number one real change structural changes in society never take place from the top on down okay it's not like somebody signs a bill in washington when that person saw president signs a bill it's because millions of people down below have demanded that bill okay uh and i would give you we talked a little bit about climate you know has led the effort in this country and around the world in raising consciousness and making demands on government with regard to climate there's been young people for the right reason you want to be living in a planet that is healthy and habitable have children that can grow up in that planet young people you know you could argue very definitely that the bill that we passed which went nowhere far enough would not have happened without the mobilization of millions of young people in this country uh and around the world uh second of all uh what the system doesn't tell you is that you're very powerful all right uh the ambassador we were talking earlier what percentage of uh uh finland is is union unionized would you guess well i think it's uh roughly 80 percent so so 80 percent and it is not an accident that a country which is 80 percent public and private unions has the kind of policies they have there has been a concerted effort for decades now on the part of corporate america and their right wing allies to break unions to make it harder for workers to organize unions right now right now literally i'm just signed a letter yesterday demanding that starbucks are starting to go shitting and and and a contract with the you know thousands of workers who voted to organize but they're they're gonna resist it um so there is power in organizing and bringing people together you with me so you know if you want universities to de-invest from fossil fuel you have the power to do that if you think that healthcare is a human right you have the power and it is more than just voting voting is very important but it is not just voting it is running for office yourself i know you know one of the things that the progressive movement has been successful about right now i'm going to be in texas i don't know next week with a guy who in his early 30s uh greg kazal out in austin texas uh and and who has been an organizer ran for office it is now going to be a united states congressman all right and we are seeing young people all over this country running for school board you could do it running for city council you could do it running for state legislate you're getting the experience running you know for congress running for president you know do whatever you want but getting involved and and the main thing is i know a lot of your friends think you know the politics is bullshit why do you want to get involved why do you come to a meeting like this and you got to tell them you really do that if they're worried about student debt they're worried about climate they're worried about women's rights and gay rights you know what if you're not involved in politics you're not really addressing those issues in one way or another you your imagination is as good as mine and what you can do but bringing people together mobilizing people putting pressure on the establishment is the way we bring about change okay so here in vermont and in a lot of the united states we have this concept that we call eugenics where basically people who are deemed unfit to reproduce are sterilized against their will and their children are taken away from them to make sure that they don't infect the next generation with some bad characteristic like maybe a disability and we still practice it here in vermont but we talk about it like it's a thing of the past and so we're working with great people in mont piliar who say they want to end this practice and i hope we can but i'm curious for the the gentleman from finland if you could tell me if there is a concept of eugenics in finland and then for senator sanders i'd like to ask if you think that there's a way that we could go a little bit higher and even try to end eugenics on a federal level maybe with federal legislation well i'm not an expert on this but i think the word has a very bad echo in it so i don't think we have that kind of practice maria have you ever heard and you know i i think i understand where you're coming from but i think there's a general practice in this country it is not the practice of the united states of the state of vermont the state of people who have disabilities are that they can't have kids but this is not why i'm understanding hello mr ambassador i have question i should have two questions first question is in this country in the united states some parties some people make some decisions for like an women's body so what's the law or rules in finland and second question is if someone like a president or kind of top make some some criminals what's the consequences because here in this country our ex president i had some criminal but nothing happened and we are shocked actually so i'm wondering that you as a finnish person how you basically approach to these problems thank you yeah well first of all if i got it correctly the first question concerns the abortion yeah so firstly the abortion it's legal according to certain medical limits and it's been so i think since the 70s early 70s and there is no discussion in finland there is no strong opposition to that no no it's uh obviously you have all the different possible views represented in our society but as i said it's it's a it's a government law it's a law of the land and i don't i haven't heard of any any major discussion on that topic for many many years so i think it's the majority of the society considers that that is settled then i think the the criminality criminality and politics obviously i'm not taking any stance towards what the u.s was having here and so on and i'm not commenting that side in our case the criminal law and the sort of system of prisons and all that stuff i think for us the the key principle here is that yes criminals get a punishment and and nobody is above the law i think the overall system is tries to strike a balance between punishing the criminal and rehabilitating them back to the society because the problem is that many of these people that have committed crimes they can't be brought back to the society become again contributing members of society and our philosophy says that once you have danio's sentence then you are you have done your your sort of duty then you should be able to go back to the society and and and and live live your life normally so we are putting a lot of resources also on on how to actually train those prisoners how to make sure that when they go back to the society that then they are they have more tools to actually succeed and and get along in that in that that life of course if you don't do that there's a high risk that these people will commit new crimes and they'll they'll come back we do not succeed all the time of course you have people who are you can't really get rid of those crimes but uh but i think we that's the intention of the system and quite often it succeeds you know on that you know finland is different than sweden although they have a lot of commonalities a number of years ago i was at a conference in sweden in Stockholm and i wanted to visit their jails i wanted to see what their jails look like because my wife said it's just her husband wants to go to a jail the other people have gone fancy places and i'm going to a jail but uh we went to a maximum security prison okay and what blew me away was you know in the united states when you're in jail a maximum security they serve you cafeteria people come down they eat they they what they were doing in sweden is they give workers a certain amount of money workers they give inmates a certain amount of money to buy the food themselves they sell it in the jail they choose what they want and they cook it up themselves so we walked into the jail we're looking around and there are all these knives that people kitchen knives sharp knives in a maximum security prison which we thought was a little bit strange but the thrust of what the ambassador was saying and what they do there is their philosophy is very different in this country admitted or not although Vermont by the way i should tell you proudly does better than most states but in many states it's really a punishment that you committed a crime we're going to get even with you we're going to make your life miserable for as long as we can and you break people you tore i mean you put them in solitary you keep them in jail for long periods of time and then when they got out of jail surprise surprise they are embedded they don't have the skills they need they don't have the education they need they're on the mental health they need and then they come back a great expense to you fifty thousand bucks a shot to keep somebody in jail so their philosophy is okay somebody committed a crime how do we reintegrate them into society how do you give them the education they need the job training they need do they succeed all the time no but their rate of recidivism is a lot less than ours is but that's that's the distinction i think that exists and by the way how long have you abolished capital punishment for how many i think it's uh we had it during the wartime during the second world war but before that that was uh i think it was in the 19th century so it's been uh more than a hundred years i think you already answered one question i had i have two uh climate questions one is is you have nuclear power plants and as i understand it they're on seismically stable areas so you don't have the fukushima problem and the other question i had is is you're doing great stuff to reduce your carbon emissions but what what is happening to your snowpack and your glaciation well basically um we don't have glaciers uh so it's uh we we have stable snow up there in the north but it melts down you may have some summers you may have some snow which stays on the mountaintops but uh we don't have glaciers so we don't directly uh no we don't we don't have that issue thank you for coming um so my question is around vermont has the highest past month uh drug use in the country um and we also had the highest overdose death rate in the country and that's in contrast to our approach to covid in which we did very well and we had a very low uh covid death rate and so um when we look at our response to infectious disease we're pretty good at um prevention but when we look at um drug misuse which is a big problem we are just beginning to spend more money on treatment but as they say in iceland treatment is the least effective most expensive way to deal with the drug um you know misuse epidemic in a society and so my question is around sort of how do you control the um corporate determinants of health which are really ill health which are really encouraging addiction and which are fighting our efforts to implement play science-based prevention methods which have been proven to be effective in places like iceland so we worked hard on trying to get that all over the state in vermont and we succeeded in getting it in just six cities um out of a hundred two hundred and fifty so um how do we get more prevention in in a disease that's clearly killing our our people it is uh horrible i i last week i was i went down to the southern part of the state uh i was in rutherland and bennington and a few other towns and what i kept hearing was an increase in uh drug violence drug related violence down in bennington they used to have nobody firing a gun uh and this year i think he said there were 18 instances of gunshots fired i don't have to tell you that in berlington we're having a serious problem rutherland is having has had its its problems uh before i give you my thoughts which are not profound on the issue maybe uh mr ambassador or we want to talk about you have a problem as well how do you address it well of course we try to firstly try to educate people that they know the risks they try to avoid it that's why how we use our school system for our public sort of education system is scared towards that uh drug use is illegal uh in fieland so we have no no legalization of any any part of the the drug use uh so it's always a crime uh that's one thing i think we still we have a discussion on this uh which has gone on for a couple of decades that should we treat cannabis differently should it be legalized or not so far i think the the maturity has basically concluded that it's uh it would be a bad solution it would increase the drug use personally i don't know what's the right answer but this is the answer we have we have so far uh i think the the problem here is that uh uh with the synthetic drugs that are cheap and that are easy to uh distribute i i think that for the police for the law enforcement for the social security social security services i think this is a it's a really difficult task to tackle i i don't think any industrial nation has been able to really fully cope with that crisis because the price distribution effect and also the the level of uh overdose uh deaths uh with these drugs are it's it's so high so i i think it's a really big danger for the society i don't have when nobody has if i would have an answer how to deal with that i think everybody would be coming to Helsinki and trying to learn from us uh well let me just say it i i don't know that anyone has any magical answers i was just thinking uh last month i met with the ambassador from columbia i don't know if you've met the gentleman uh it's a new government there it's a progressive government do you know how many households in columbia are dependent on the production of cocoa cocoa or whatever it's called which becomes cocaine 300 thousand families produce that drug that's how they live that's how they make their living so what they're trying to do which is again not easy and columbia is just one country is to move those people into agriculture which is which is not cocoa related right not easy we've got to help them do that so you've got to get to the source of the problem uh second of all uh as uh the ambassador mentioned you know when i was a kid growing up the drug there was a drug problem but nowhere near what it is today everybody knew that heroin killed you everybody knew that and i am not sure that young people fully understand that right now now i happen to believe that marijuana should for a variety of reasons should be legalized and i think the president made a a good step forward by taking right now you have schedule one of the uh whatever it's a substance abuse act of what it is where marijuana is linked at the same level as heroin and fentanyl well you may well not like marijuana but it is not fentanyl and it surely is not heroin so i think taking it to another level uh it is is quite right so i think prevention in sense of educating our people is one thing and number two it's trying to understand what does it mean that in a country it is not just drugs it is alcohol it is tobacco it is food we have a lot of addiction in this country and it speaks to i think of the deterioration of community people need that stuff to get by if your life is falling apart you know what you know maybe heroin is is an answer it's a killer answer we know i mean it's not an answer but what i mean is i can you can understand why somebody turns to a high if their life is that in that much despair so we've got to deal with that why is there so much despair uh in the country so it is a very you know and then you got cartels who are almost major billion dollar military operations all right who are fighting governments throughout latin america and in mexico it is a bit of a problem and uh but i think you know clearly vermont does better by the way than most states in terms of prevention may not think we do well but it's better i think than many states no you don't think so i know yeah well there are reasons why but i mean i think there are states where there's almost no no treatment capabilities i was saying in terms of treatment we try to do a little bit better but treatment it's hard addiction is a very hard thing to overcome it is an expensive thing should we invest in it absolutely and by the way i mean one of the things uh in the so-called gun safety bill that passed a couple of months ago frankly didn't have all that much to do with guns but it put eight billion dollars into mental health and some of that stuff will be related to addiction and this question is for the ambassador and as the senator has already alluded in this country and we have a really big health care crisis and in my opinion one of the biggest cracks is mental health services so if you can comment on how broadly your mental health system is structured and do your citizens have the right type of mental health access at the right time and for your citizens across the country thanks it's a great question and i i would say that we are coping with an increasing increasing problem it's been getting worse since the pandemic i think we know the reasons people they have had some economic hardship the the isolation for many people doesn't work so i think we are and families are many families are kind of are living a more difficult situation so there's an kind of optic in those cases especially it's it concerns the younger people so our system of health care it's i mean the mental health care it's basically it's part of the same system that functions in in every other disease or illnesses as well but they have a lot of work flow and i think that there is a there's a problem of of getting an access to to so suitable care immediately of course if there's a really difficult case that a person needs an instant care that is being taken care of but if you need an appointment if you if you need kind of if your case is a bit more mild then i think there are long queues to get that treatment so there is a problem another problem of ours so that this discussion is also a bit balanced in the sense that we have troubles as well our main problem is that we have a lack of qualified personnel why because we have an aging problem in the society so we have demographically less payers of the system the system in my view is good but if you if you have a disbalance between who are actively in work life and who are financing the system versus who are on pension mainly using the services so i think we have now a disbalance here and and the difficulty is that because you have more older people and and they need more services and so the same old number of nurses for example is not sufficient to cover this increased workload and and this is a problem that we can't solve easily because you just can't train qualified nurse just anybody you have to go through the school so you have to get the get the qualifications so that's a difficult problem it's going to take years to solve it in our case and there are no quick fixes either okay maybe a couple more questions hello y'all good evening thank you for your tape fielding so many questions um i'd like to talk about the future i just finished 10 years on a local school board and about eight years ago i read a book called the smartest kids in the world the uh was by a new york times reporter who highlighted among other things the finish educational system and it was really striking um but one person in on one school board in the smallest state in the country or second smallest state by population in the country it's hard to how do you start fomantic change so my question for the ambassador is what elements of the finish system might we consider implementing here in order to achieve some of the success that the finished people have well thank you um obviously i'm not gonna give you any advice on how you should run your country but i think in our case the the key reason for a success in education system is is fairly simple first of all your teachers have to have high qualifications in our case you need to have masters you need to have masters secondly a teacher profession you have to have a decent salary in our case it doesn't mean that they they get rich or they are kind of get super high income but in most places i think the tough part is Helsinki which is the housing costs are high but elsewhere teaching is a good way to a middle class stable life and fulfilling professional life and and and actually the the salary is competitive in in in all all Finland except for Helsinki i would say thirdly i think teachers when they have masters they earn a decent income what do they need they need sufficient degree of independence so we are not micromanaging what the teachers and how the teachers should teach they get broad objectives what the the the students need to learn then they are free to choose their own ways of dealing with that so we don't think that teachers are just like robots that repeat some some sort of plan given from above but they are highly trained professionals that need a degree of liberty to do that that's how you actually also attract top talent so in our case in those faculties that train teachers actually getting into those faculties is really competitive so it's not just a kind of a leftover faculty for those who don't get into other faculties so it's actually best and brightest many of them actually don't only go to medical school or things like that but many choose that profession so i think the for us the keeping the the the respect and and decent pay level and independence of a teacher profession is is one of the key key factors but then i would add also this broader societal things like in our case our social programs actually started really in earnest after the second world war how free school meal why it was really practical thing because Finland was such a poor country that many people simply couldn't afford almost any food at all during the school day so the government had to kind of fill the gap so that these kids would grow healthy because if you don't have any protein and also your school results drop your you will have all kinds of trouble so it was actually cheaper to provide them with that meal rather than deal with the consequences later on so so yeah but i think you have also these more broad dimensions rather than just teaching what's what is interesting about the Finnish system also is is i understand that your kids go to school later they have shorter school days and they have less homework in other words what they try to do there also is create a relaxed environment where kids can retain their spontaneity and enjoy things and when you have that kind of condition then you open to learning if you drill kids if you depress kids kids don't want to go to school you're like forcing them to learn but learning should be fun and i think that's something that finland approaches in a fairly unique way is my right yeah you're right so in our case you go to school you go to preschool when you are six and that's actually obligatory now you have to go to preschool then you start your real school first grade when you are seven yeah the school days because my boys go to these are pretty schooling in dc so i know that the days are longer than they would be in finland and it would be more relaxed in finland especially the first years so you are right we try to kind of create an environment when they are not they shouldn't be so tired we shouldn't put too much emphasis on the academic heavy stuff in the early early early years so that's the philosophy i think i mean i'm a product of that philosophy i don't know if that's good but i think we can compare that and i tend to believe that like for example in our case we know that our boys they speak english at school they speak only finnish at home so they have an extra burner they have to operate on two different languages all the time they used to have a third language as well but now they've they've basically lost but what it doesn't mean it doesn't mean that uh we don't really burden them with a lot of after school academic activities or anything because i mean we appreciate that you guys had to learn you go to school in english my older boy he reads books in english it's not his native language at all so it's it's already enough so we are not trying to get overly ambitious or try to make Einstein's out of them uh much too early okay maybe the last question helly you got somebody where okay good yes um mystery ambassador uh before coming to romant i spent two years in Vilnius um lesuania where everyone i met held finnish people in the highest esteem they were the most popular people at every party and um i was wondering how the finnish people feel about their neighbors both in the baltik states and now especially with their new government in sweden yeah well obviously we are friendly people we love peace we think uh we should always get along with your neighbors even if you have different systems of beliefs and and political systems and obviously sweden is our closest neighbor we used to live in one country we used to be part of sweden uh as finland was always distinctive in terms of language we had our cultural and also some political uh distinctiveness but uh we were part of the same country same political system so we shared the same laws 700 years together so sweden is like uh there are differences but sweden is like a it's like another side of the coin uh if you will then of course other nordics norways we have 700 kilometers so 450 miles uh of common border of norways is the same although we're never part of the same country uh at the same time estonians estonia one of the baltik countries um actually the finnish and estonian languages are the together with hungarian are the only finna ogrik languages in europe that are being spoken uh so uh we can actually learn estonian fairly quickly and they can also learn finnish the problem with that is that you may have an illusion that you understand estonian because it's so close and many many of the i would say critical words have a totally opposite meaning so so so so finnish people who think they know estonian are taking huge risks so russians uh obviously that's a complicated history i think we've had our first year of wars the last war ended um in 1944 and was it a tough war yes just to give an example winter war with finna and soviet union was in 1939 uh until uh march 1940 uh us lost in vietnam in the peak months of fighting it was made 1968 you lost 500 men a week in the winter war finland lost 800 guys a day during the first fight and that was out of four million so that tells you how intense the war was so um if you've gone through all these kind of things then of obviously there's a historical burden i think one of the consequences of this russian aggression towards ukraine was that actually it opened some of these old wounds in the finnish side of uh psychology it's not us this time it's ukrainian but uh but you can't really forget those things both of my grandfathers they did fight many years against the soviets on the front lines so i'm part of that generation who still grew up listening to their stories and that that but nevertheless we've been trying to really develop our relations with the russians since the break breakup of the soviet union uh to give you an example before the pandemic 2019 finland did issue 800 000 visas to russians and 10 of all russian foreign travel was to finland so we it was we were actually there's a lot of interaction now our people think differently we think that if you guys start attacking neighboring countries if you commit war crimes like you do if you want just want to kill people you destroy civilians you destroy infants then we don't actually want to see you here so we actually limit that now the the issuing of visas grammatically they're basically down to bear almost zero so we are living difficult times now we also lost all of our trade which was slot roughly five percent of our foreign trade so that's a complicated relationship i don't know what the long-term consequences of this conflict are for our relations but they will be different they will be different for years and years to come unfortunately all right um well i hope you found the evening uh enjoyable and informative uh thank you all very very much for coming and let me thank you about tonight thank you